Heights of fashion: Wuthering Heights on screen, from Wyler to MTV

Wuthering Heights (William Wyler, 1939)

Bar a 1920 silent filmed by British director A.V. Bramble, now considered lost, William Wyler’s full-bore Hollywood melodrama stands as the first important screen version of Brontë’s masterwork.

Even though Laurence Olivier’s lantern-jawed Heathcliff doesn’t exhibit the simultaneous shades of dark and light that permeate later incarnations of the character, Wyler’s film boasts a heady gothic style informed by German expressionism, snappy pacing (courtesy of the screenplay by Ben Hecht, Charles MacArthur and an uncredited John Huston) and a genuine understanding of the kind of romance that would blossom in this sort of domestic setting. 

If there’s a through-line from Wyler’s film to Andrea Arnold’s verbally spare new ‘Wuthering Heights’, it’s that both make sublime use of pregnant pauses: in the 1939 film, when Cathy makes an instinctive rendezvous with Heathcliff on their secret ledge, there’s almost 30 seconds of silence before the couple prance off to “collect heather”.

Abismos de pasión (Luis Buñuel, 1954) 

Buñuel originally wrote the screenplay for his version of Brontë’s novel in 1931, but was only finally able to shoot it during his exile in Mexico. A psychodrama delivered at fever pitch, his film has the central amour fou between Cathy and Heathcliff (renamed ‘Catalina’ and ‘Alejandro’) beset on all sides by class and religious hectoring. Buñuel cunningly begins his version midway through the text, leaving the blissful nurturing of the pair’s love as context to be inferred from the violent machinations of Alejandro’s return from exile. 

The religious overtones are overt, with Alejandro constantly referred to as a “devil” (an epithet that’s mischievously echoed in his dagger-like sideburns) and the moral superiority expressed by Catalina’s vile, butterfly-killing husband Eduardo (Ernesto Alonso) and Isabel (Lilia Prado), the woman Alejandro marries as an act of revenge. Laced with the director’s typically acerbic humour (an ominous opening shot has a wake of buzzards perching on a crooked tree), it also contains one of his most potent dream sequences, a climactic vision of everlasting love that transmutes into death and damnation at the sound of a gun blast. 

Hurlevent (Jacques Rivette, 1985) 
Rivette’s subtly erotic spin on the material sits at an interesting juncture in his career, recalling as much the starched meta-melodrama he had his characters magically observe in Céline and Julie Go Boating (1974) as the fraught private flirtations that make up the backbone of his recent Balzac adaptation Don’t Touch the Axe (2007). Transplanted to the verdant idyll of the Cévennes region during the early 1900s, Hurlevent features assured performances from Fabienne Babe (as a sultry Catherine) and Lucas Belvaux (as a taciturn ‘Roch’), who manage to bring both a theatrical precision and a graceful spontaneity to their complex roles. It’s filmed simply in closeted, cramped interiors, but this approach yields dramatic riches by forcing the lovers into close proximity, while also creating a powerful contrast with the rapturous scenes of the couple’s illicit hillside frolics, which are almost ecstatic in their lyricism, heightened by the evocative use of traditional Bulgarian choir music on the soundtrack.

Arashi ga oka (Yoshida Yoshishige, 1988)

Yoshida’s idiosyncratic rendering of Brontë’s novel is cut from the same delirious cloth as Kurosawa’s lauded literary reconfigurations Throne of Blood and Ran. To give a sense of the tone, the film is bookended with shots of characters having their arms severed with samurai swords, and there’s even a prolonged fight sequence halfway through in which the foundling Heathcliff character (named ‘Onimaru’ and played with lunatic relish by the late Japanese tough guy Matsuda Yûsaku) takes down a gang of peasants with a length of bamboo. Deliberately paced and ornately photographed, Yoshida’s ultra-pessimistic reading suggests that only through death can we really understand the extent of love. Much of the running time is dedicated to chronicling Onimaru’s grotesque reaction to the passing of his lover ‘Kinu’ (Tanaka Yūko), which includes an attempted rape of their young daughter and regular visits to molest her desiccated corpse. The film climaxes with a swordfight on the slopes of a volcano.

Wuthering Heights (Peter Kosminsky, 1992) 

Despite refusing to lapse into mawkish melodrama, the feature debut of lauded British TV director Peter Kosminsky feels hamstrung by its source material. Along with Arashi ga oka, it’s the only film version to attempt to drag the entire book on to the screen, yet the story’s two-part structure serves only to lessen its power as a piece of cinema (unlike, say, Buñuel’s abridged but thematically focused version). Juliette Binoche is poorly cast as both Catherine Earnshaw — a mess of giggles and dodgy French inflections who, for reasons that are hard to fathom, accepts the advances of blow-dried fop Edgar Linton (Simon Shepherd from Peak Practice) — and their daughter Cathy Linton. Ralph Fiennes makes his suitably intense feature debut as Heathcliff, but though the acting and dialogue are passably robust, Kosminsky displays little definable visual sense as a director.

MTV’s Wuthering Heights (Suri Krishnamma, 2003)

A deservedly obscure blemish on the learn-while-you-watch cycle of literary classics retooled as teen high-school capers (1999’s Cruel Intentions appears to be a key inspiration). ‘Heath’ is now an angular, Chippendale-like emo rock prodigy, ‘Kate’ a willowy singer who likes late-night dirt-bike rides down the shoreline, and Wuthering Heights (dubbed ‘The Heights’) a stucco lighthouse in the OC. Largely dispensing with the unworkable class rift between Kate and Heath (thereby negating a key theme in the book), the script reads like bowdlerised York Notes as polished by a second-tier celebrity blogger. Rather than examine a love that transcends time and space, the finale is chiefly concerned with whose baby Kate is holding.