Wuthering Heights (1939)

Directed by William Wyler. Starring Merle Oberon, Laurence Olivier, Geraldine Fitzgerald, David Niven, Flora Robson, Hugh Williams, Donald Crisp, Leo G. Carroll, Miles Mander, Cecil Kellaway, Cecil Humphreys.

Well-made film adaptation of Emily Brontë’s only novel (the first half of it, anyway) builds a surprising amount of turbulent atmosphere—considering that the story’s famed craggy English moors were recreated north of Los Angeles in Thousand Oaks—in telling the story of stormy, star-crossed lovers Catherine (Oberon) and Heathcliff (Olivier) in the gloomy lands of Wuthering Heights. Olivier is brilliantly tempestuous in his film-acting breakthrough (he credited Wyler for teaching how to act onscreen as opposed to onstage), playing the “hellish soul” Heathcliff, long misidentified by many readers/filmgoers as a tragic romantic figure instead of the bitter and jealous (yet still mesmerizing) creature he is. The romantic complications are the stuff of soapy melodrama, the “happy ending” coda is a dreadful miscalculation, and the temperamental mood shifts are less creditable in Oberon’s hands (whose overall performance is merely adequate, and overwrought in the case of her final scene), but it’s still a diverting story told with sweeping gesture and wild emotions, and it’s evocatively photographed by Gregg Toland, who won an Academy Award. Released the same year as Gone with the Wind, which is of note because the way that Olivier’s co-star behaves among her upper class fellows resembles the spoiled snobbery of Scarlett O’Hara, who was played by Olivier’s inamorata, Vivien Leigh.

74/100