Wuthering Heights – hard to adapt?

I recently watched the 2009 two-part television adaptation of Wuthering Heights on DVD. I found it disappointing, but it got me thinking about the different versions of it that have been filmed for cinema or television.

I was aware of four – the 2009 version, the 1939 classic with Merle Oberon and Laurence Olivier, a 1970 film with Timothy Dalton, and a 1978 TV adaptation my husband says was much better than the 2009 outing. But only a few minute’s research revealed there have been thirteen films, ten telemovies, and eight TV series adaptations of Wuthering Heights. And that’s not delving into the eight radio dramas, three operas, two musical theatre productions, five other theatrical performances (one a musical score for a ballet), and a graphic novel.

All this for a novel that got very mixed reviews when it was published in 1847. Some reviewers of the day were askance that anyone could write such ‘savage and selfish characters’. They also found the storyline hard to follow, even if they did appreciate the powerful drama and author Emily Bronte’s imagination in bringing it to life.

Wuthering Heights does, in fact, have a reputation as hard to film, which is why some versions have cut the story back. Rather than attempt to follow the two generations of the book, they concentrate only on Cathy and Heathcliff and leave out the second generation.

The novel was first filmed in 1920 as a British silent movie. Nineteen years later, possibly the best-known version was released, starring Merle Oberon as Cathy and Laurence Olivier as Heathcliff. The harder edges of the story are softened in typical Hollywood style for this adaptation, and it doesn’t contain the story of the second generation. But it still has a romantically broody Heathcliff against great gloomy moorland settings.

I have a soft spot for the 1970 film version starring Bond-to-be Timothy Dalton. A 1970 British production with Anna Calder-Marshall as Cathy, it follows the 1939 cut-down approach, depicting only the first sixteen chapters, and ending with the death of Catherine Earnshaw Linton.

In contrast, the 2009 version depicts the whole book – well, sort of. Tom Hardy and Charlotte Riley star in this adaptation by writer Peter Bowker. Interviews with Bowker appear to reveal an approach to the original work overladen with sheer hubris.

Stumped by what he called the book’s ‘complex and sometimes frustrating structure’, he disassembles it, dropping the original narrator, Lockwood, and rearranging the sequence of elements to make the telling better in his opinion. It isn’t. It’s just confusing. He also renders Heathcliff nothing more than a psychopathic dullard fixated on revenge, and Cathy rather two-dimensional and lacking in passion.

At some point I hope to view the BBC’s 1978 five-part television adaptation of Wuthering Heights. It is available on DVD and retells the book in its entirety.

My husband reviewed it as a professional film and tv critic on its release, and he especially liked the way the opening episode set the mood almost as a ghost story by faithfully including the visitor Mr Lockwood chilled by his (imagined?) sighting of Cathy outside his window.

This adaptation was widely praised, the writing described by AllMovie as ‘deftly juggling the many characters and subplots without the slightest sense of strain’. And it does this all without the need for dismissing characters and reassembling the story.

Of the other adaptations, I’d love to hear the Grammy Award-nominated spoken word recording with Judith Anderson, Claire Bloom, and James Mason, and I’m intrigued by The Ghost of Wuthering Heights, a 2000 radio drama that adapted the ghost story elements of the novel.

No chance though of seeing Heathcliff, the 1996 stage musical starring Cliff Richard, though I did hear two or three songs from it when Richard toured Australia in 1994. Critics panned the show. They must have been peeved that it broke box office records and their scathing reviews were quoted on posters for the show to contrast their opinions with the nearly half a million people who loved it.