Les Hauts de Hurlevent

This is a classic example of a film made with the best of intentions, where most of the people involved didn't quite have a handle on the material and wound up producing something fairly inoffensive but forgettable... EXCEPT... somehow there are shining moments.

I've seen a lot of movies and it is pretty hard to impress me; but the sequence near the end of the film where Heathcliff goes down to Cathy's grave, later to be led on up the hill by her ghost, is simply one of the most haunting fleeting moments of cinema I have ever seen. In ANY film (and I have seen very many of the greats). Yes, this was just a lowly little teen-oriented American International Picture, directed by some studio stalwart, starring some inexperienced actors who were given a not very challenging screenplay that wasn't all that true to the source material. But this brief sequence just rises above all that -- simply and brilliantly directed, unforgettably scored (by Michel Legrand), fearlessly acted by a very young Timothy Dalton.

I don't know if I can recommend the movie based just on that, flawed as the film is, but I couldn't stop thinking about that scene for days, how close it got to the human condition on a visceral yet poetic level. It's just one of those things about moments of movie magic. You never know where it will strike, even in movies that don't rank with the best. I can't say I thought this version of Wuthering Heights was the best, but I can certainly understand why many people have remembered it fondly.

This version of Wuthering Heights was pretty much dismissed by the major reviewers back in 1970. Many of those reviewers couldn't get past the American International logo before ridiculing the movie as second rate teen angst. It has been treated more kindly in later years (three stars in Maltin's guide), but the film falls short in several areas. It's true that AIP spent more money on this than they normally did. Even the Corman Poe movies had a lower budget than WH. They hired a few middle level "name actors," primarily Harry Andrews and Pamela Brown (who is in only two scenes). Robert Fuest was not exactly a name director (before or after this) but he had delivered a big hit for AIP in "The Abominable Dr. Phibes." So, this was probably his reward.

I agree that the photography was the film's best asset, and the late John Coquillion, who shot it, went on to a fairly distinguished career, including shooting three Peckinpah films. The decision to film "on location" was also good, and the moors look appropriately bleak.

The major problem for me was not that the movie ends (as the 1939 version did) halfway through the novel, but that the transitions are abrupt and jarring. Now I have only seen it on vhs--the original EMI- HBO tape, not one of the later cheap versions--but I think It was uncut. There is, for instance, an unexplained gap from Cathy's decision to marry Edgar. Suddenly she married him, and his parents are both dead. There was a lame attempt to explain this in a scene of Edgar and Cathy in the graveyard. The sequence of Heathcliff seducing Edgar's sister is trite, as is the "shampoo commercial" ambiance of the love scene between Heathcliff and Cathy.

On the plus side Andrews and Julian Glover (as the adult Hindley) give good performances. I get the feeling that if AIP had been willing to spend a bit more, and maybe rework the script a bit for pace, this could have been a very good film. But as Sam Arkoff was once quoted in an Esquire magazine article about the AIP Beach Party movies, "Sometimes we get some director over here from the majors, and he says 'Sam if I could just have two more days, I could make you a good picture.' The hell with that," Arkoff continued. "We're not 'artsy-fartsy' at AIP!"

This particular rendition of Wuthering Heights is truthfully not as faithful to the novel as it could have been. Yet, I believe that this film expresses the bleary tone of the novel with the most stylistic level of credit. I think that any time a novel is translated into film it loses a certain amount of credibility due to the fact that the mediums of film and literature are interpreted by an audience in very different ways. But having read the novel, I prefer this version to any other that I've seen on film. Heathcliff and Cathy are cast astounding well in the film. Dalton is brooding and flawed without compromising his dark good looks while Calder-Marshall is waifishly emblematic of the heroine of the novel. I only wish that the film had delved more into the novel instead of offering merely of survey of it.

Timothy Dalton plays Heathcliff as no one before or since has played him. He is passionate and brooding, cruel and tender. His bright eyes pierce through Cathy's soul, and our own, when he returns from his wanderings to find her married to Edgar Linton.

The rest of the cast is also well-chosen. Anna Calder-Marshall, not as conventionally beautiful as other Cathy's have been, nonetheless, portrays the charisma of the character and her possessive, obsessive personality with brilliant accuracy. Ian Ogilvy as Edgar is just the right touch of gentle lover and aristocratic snob, so that it is believable that Cathy might actually fall for him, on the surface at any rate.

This was Mr. Dalton's first foray into the gothic depths of the Bronte sisters' works. His second, as Mr. Rochester in the fine BBC version (1985) of Jane Eyre, was just as compelling. Now if he were just a few inches shorter, we could get him to play the French teacher in a movie of Villette!!

OK - first let me say that there has been a lot of talk about this version vs the 1992 version with Fiennes and Binoche. In fact, both productions made one fundamental mistake which would have otherwise rendered each version near perfect - they cast the wrong female leads. Calder-Marshall is far too posh for Cathy. My goodness me though - Dalton is perfect as Heathcliffe. I'm going to put this down to the make up department but it's actually hard to believe that Calder-Marshall is about 3 years younger than him. I actually think she is a good actress, but certainly miscast as Cathy. What really galls me though is the screenplay which takes such liberties with the story, much of which is simply left out and a completely different ending formulated. The last time I felt so cheated was when I watched Captain Corelli's Mandolin! Bottom line - a great example of a real missed opportunity to be the definitive version...