The greatest love stories ever re-told? The legacy of the Brontë sisters on screen

Hollywood never really decided how to take the Brontë novels. Yes, they were classics, but were they love stories or horror movies? First came a clutch of silent Jane Eyres. In 1913 with Ethel Grandin and Irving Cummings; in 1915 with Louise Vale and Alan Hale; in 1921 with Mabel Ballin and Norman Trevor. There have been three sound versions: in 1934 with Virginia Bruce and Colin Clive; in 1943 with Joan Fontaine and Orson Welles; and in 1972 with Susannah York and George C. Scott. The silent British Wuthering Heights of 1920 had been genteel; but even William Wyler’s famous 1939 version with Olivier and Merle Oberon (Sam Goldwyn had envisaged it as primarily a vehicle for her) suffered from an excess of reverence. It was immediately nominated for four Academy Awards (best picture, script, direction, camera), but only Gregg Toland won. And despite being much admired, it didn’t start to make a profit until it was reshown.

Somewhat rewritten, and overkeen to find a 1970 mood and interpretation for what can only be a period piece, the 1970 British remake directed by Robert Fuest and starring Timothy Dalton and Anna Calder-Marshall marked a z-film company’s first and last effort to enter the big time. It sank without trace. Even the versions of Wuthering Heights by Buñuel (1953) and Rivette (1985), which were not afraid to make adjustments for the medium, were dislocated and false to the spirit and intensity of the original. They were interesting failures.

In the late 30s, Hollywood had very limited ideas on the sub-earthly and the super-earthly. The sub-earthly meant storm effects of wind and snow, a ghost at the window, and Heathcliff presented as a Byronic hero in the shape of Olivier in his early matinée idol persona: handsome, sombre and monosyllabic. The super-earthly meant a note of sentimentally exalted romance, a love affair dating from childhood and a final transparency of Heathcliff and Catherine united after death.

Perhaps it was too much to ask Wyler’s Wuthering Heights to cope with Emily Brontë’s Heathcliff and Cathy. Even so, there was no particular reason to require Cathy to take a bath – discreetly, of course – on screen; nor for including such immortal dialogue as “Why aren’t you my Prince?” – from Catherine to Heathcliff; “You’re still my Queen” – Heathcliff to Catherine; and “Why isn’t the smell of heather in your hair?” – Heathcliff to Isabella.

The film’s determined effort to transform the novel into Hollywooden material is shown particularly in the treatment of the Lintons and their home Thrushcross Grange, although Geraldine Fitzgerald’s Isabella Linton is the one performance Emily Brontë might have acknowledged. But Thrushcross Grange is deprived altogether of its distinctive atmosphere as a polar opposite of Wuthering Heights. In this version, it becomes a centre of social gaiety, attracting the rank and fashion of Yorkshire to its glittering balls.

Graham Greene wrote: “In this California-constructed Yorkshire, among the sensitive neurotic English voices, sex is cellophaned; there is no egotism, no obsession … Candle-flames flicker, windows blow in draughts, monstrous shadows lie across the indifferent faces of the actors, all to lend significance to a rather dim story which would not have taxed the talents of Mr Ben Hecht to have invented himself … So a lot of reverence has gone into a picture which should have been as coarse as a sewer. Some readers may remember Orage, a not very distinguished French film: the lovers in the stifling inn room beating off flies. Something of that carnality was needed here: the sentimental rendezvous under a crag where Heathcliff and Cathy used to play as children is not a substitute. The whole picture is Keepsake stuff.”

With Buñuel’s Abismos de Pasión, Wuthering Heights might have been thought to have met its ideal director. It is a subversive, deeply disturbing novel and Buñuel’s preoccupation with sexual aberrations and strange fetishes and the iconoclastic nature of his work had made him the subject of public outcry since the start of his film career. Abismos de Pasión came immediately after Robinson Crusoe and before La Ilusión Viaja en Tranvia. It was made in Mexico in 1953. Since then, little has been seen of it; but in February 1984 it received a rare British screening at the National Film Theatre.

Like Wyler, Buñuel made no attempt to cover the whole story, and his version starts at the point when Heathcliff returns in September 1783 after his three-year absence and ends with his death which, in the film, follows shortly after that of Cathy in March 1784. No attempt is made to explain who the characters are. From the beginning, it is clear that Heathcliff and Cathy are in love, but nothing is said to explain Heathcliff’s presence.

According to Buñuel’s autobiography, he and Pierre Unik wrote the screenplay in 1930. “Like all surrealists I was deeply moved by this novel and I had always wanted to try the movie. The opportunity finally came in Mexico in 1953. I knew I had a first rate script but unfortunately I had to work with actors hired for a musical.” The actors nevertheless acquitted themselves reasonably well, but the liberties taken with the plot (culminating in Heathcliff’s death by shooting at the hands of Hareton Earnshaw) and the transformation of the deeply indigenous Nelly Dean and Joseph into Mexican peasants are hard to take. No use was made of Emily Brontë’s great prose.

“How much better they would have made Wuthering Heights in France,” said Graham Greene hopefully in 1939, “they know there how to shoot sexual passion.” But it was not until 1985 that Jacques Rivette gave us Hurlevent, a new version of Emily Brontë’s great French novel Les Hauts de Hurlevent. Rivette previously avoided adaptations of classic books following a troublesome time with Diderot’s La Religieuse in 1965; but his return to a set text after years of improvised meanderings was not a capitulation to mainstream cinema. He remained his own intransigent master.

The setting for Hurlevent was transferred from the Yorkshire moors to central Provence in the 1930s; Catherine kept her original name, but Heathcliff became ‘Roch’. The brute monosyllable was entirely appropriate, for Rivette had no truck with romantic ardour or Gothic mystery: his characters expressed themselves through yells, scowls, punches, pummels and the odd fit of biting. While his young, unknown and overstretched performers thus cavorted, Rivette adopted a lordly, objective directorial style, only occasionally shaping events with a flourish. Scenes like the couple’s first mad dash across the parched summer landscape and a suggestive conversational encounter across a billiard table hinted at the stark passions waiting to be unleashed; but the film’s clinical style and inexperienced performers successfully conspired to batten them down.

An article in Cahiers du Cinéma revealed that Rivette claimed to have found inspiration for his film in the Polish illustrator Balthus’ stark, violent illustrations to Wuthering Heights (1933), and certainly a film shot can use or bring to mind a well-known painting, as in a tableau vivant. But the allusion to a painting is always ambiguous in film. When we see some element we recognise as ‘like a picture’, the very fact means that the flow stops short. Which is just what happens in Hurlevent. I do not know if it was intentional, this working like a zoom-lens cameraman, breaking off from the narration for a second to stop and look at some still life, but the effect was to interrupt the action and deflect the narrative continuity. For the nearest equivalent to Wuthering Heights in film, we have to turn to Truffaut.

The resemblance of the plot and theme of Jules et Jim (1961) and Deux Anglaises et le Continent (1971) to the first part of Wuthering Heights is striking, although that novel was only read by author Henri-Pierre Roché after the real life events recorded in his Diaries on which he based his books. These two triangular films – one about two men and the woman they worship, the other about two English girls and the young Frenchman who introduces them to passion – hold Brontë echoes everywhere, although Kate in Jules et Jim is confusingly, for Wuthering Heights purposes, named Catherine by Truffaut.

Kate’s husband Jules is gentle with bookish leanings like Edgar Linton, while Jim, a writer, is passionate, hard and violent like Heathcliff. The film is entirely an examination, in Jim’s words, of “what people call love”. Kate, with her dazzlingly original character (she is friend, lover, mother and spoiled child), is seen by Roché as Woman in essence. Emily Brontë has none of this fascinated respect for her heroine, whose self-centred behaviour is carefully placed by Nelly Dean, the narrative structure and the very different example of her daughter. (Roché and Truffaut pessimistically show Kate’s daughter instinctively repeating her mother’s attitudes.) Truffaut too, although he leaves moral speculation largely to the audience, provides an acerbic narrative frame for the heavily symbolic freeze-frames of Kate’s archaic smile with its untrammelled romanticism: “Voice off: Catherine had always wished her ashes to be scattered to the winds from the top of a hill … but it was not allowed.”

Both Truffaut and Emily Brontë isolate the striking irrationality which impels the heroine of each novel to destroy her own possibility of happiness; both note that the only kind of love a woman like Kate or Catherine can feel is death-centred. The strength of the film lies in Truffaut’s ability to evoke a civilisation made by men which is indestructible by Woman, a point at which Jules et Jim is more subtle than Wuthering Heights, where the ill-will between Edgar and Heathcliff is dramatically commonplace. Nevertheless, the film omits the physical violence of Roché’s novel, and is thus more suave and less disturbing than either its source or Wuthering Heights.

Deux Anglaises was finely described by Truffaut as “not a film on physical love, but a physical film on love.” The characters do not permit their passion autonomy, just as the director will not permit the story to tell itself: it is closely controlled by Truffaut/Roché/Claude’s narration and language. Claude is an art critic who is also a critic of life (his own included). The first words we hear him speak over the credits are: “Some day I will write our story,” i.e. impersonalise it as art, which is just what the film itself is doing. Muriel, the deep-voiced, farouche, almost masculine Emily Brontë-like character, says that it is not love but the incertitude of love that disturbs life: Claude’s response is the certitude of words as text. Rows of copies of Les Deux Anglaises et le Continent (the book) are presented from different angles, the camera moving ever closer, the rhythm of the cutting imputing a heartbeat to the object.

And all along, Truffaut uses Brontë parallels to give direction to Roché’s diffuse novel. The liberating impact of Claude (Le Continent) on Anne and Muriel reflects the effect of Brussels on the Brontë sisters (forcing Charlotte into love and Emily into reconsidering her melodramatic Byronic daydreams); Claude’s frequent passivity in the face of Anne, Muriel, Mrs Brown and his mother (compare Branwell); Muriel’s mysterious quality, absolute, untouchable and self-contained (compare Emily); her blindfold due to eyestrain (compare Charlotte); Anne Brown’s death in the film from tuberculosis instead of the marriage and four children Roché gives her (compare Emily Brontë); the brief shot of Branwell’s portrait of Emily in the Brown home. Above all, Truffaut concentrates on Muriel rather than Anne Brown, on her self-contained, obsessive search for identity which is inseparable from the written word. Throughout the film, the emphasis is on language and madness (Emily Brontë) rather than the sensuality and openness to experience of Roché’s novel.

Although Truffaut always sought to deny that his films were superior to Roché’s novels, in general they wipe out inessentials to make the themes inescapable, telescope with advantage, translate intellectual elements successfully into dramatic forms and interpolate very little. They are faithful renditions which shirk almost nothing.

The most impressive film treatment of Jane Eyre to date remains the 1943 Robert Stevenson version. Joan Fontaine was Jane among studio-bound Yorkshire moors, and much too pretty, but by sheer will she managed to project some of the right innocence before the film rolled downhill. James Agee wrote: “A careful and tame production, a sadly vanilla-flavoured Joan Fontaine, and Orson Welles treating himself to road operatic sculpturings of body, cloak and diction, his eyes glinting in the Rembrandt gloom, at every chance, like side orders of jelly.”

The Brontë oddity was an idiotic biopic called Devotion (“it tells ALL about those Brontë sisters”). Ida Lupino starred as Emily. She was a strong, convincing actress who for a brief period looked like a challenger for the Bette Davis crown at Warners. Indeed, she was sedulously built up by that studio as a successor: but somehow she didn’t quite get the breaks. Devotion set her career back years. In 1946, in the wake of the successful Hollywood versions of Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre, Warners released (or let escape) the film Curtis Bernhardt had made three years earlier, Devotion. Unfortunately, it was never made clear who was devoted to whom or what, unless it was curate Paul Henreid, an object of passion for Charlotte (Olivia de Havilland), Emily (Lupino) and Anne (Nancy Coleman). They all wrote novels and had a drunken brother called Branwell (Arthur Kennedy). An excuse was found to give the curate, the Rev Nicholls, an Austrian accent and the whole piece was set off by Emily’s recurrent dream of death as a silhouetted man on horseback. Despite – or because of – its strange conceits, Devotion still appeals to lovers of kitsch movies. After all, it does contain one of the screen’s immortal exchanges. As Charlotte is walking with Sidney Greenstreet, they meet a man. “Good morning, Mr Thackeray.” “Good morning, Mr Dickens.”

By a strange coincidence, Dickens was also introduced (as the author of Mugby Junction) into André Téchiné’s bold but bathetic Les Soeurs Brontë (1978). It was a brave dramatic dead-end to focus on Branwell’s doomed affair with his employer’s wife, Mrs Robinson (“vielle mère phallique à la crinière rousse”, Cahiers). But on film, as in life, this commonplace consummated love sorted oddly with the Sisters’ stern asceticism, embodied, as in Devotion, by strange conceits. Isabelle Adjani (Emily) stalks the moors in drag; Charlotte (Marie-France Pisier) smiles a lot but prefers to see nothing rather than wear glasses; her father grimaces madly. At intervals, a noble golden light, denoting literary genius, bathes the screen. Etrange trinité!