Wuthering Heights (1939) Their's was a love. A love of butter. Uh, wait a second, I must be thinking
of a different couple. Heathcliff and Cathy were just a couple of crazy kids
from the moors of England that just couldn't seem to get things worked out.
You've might have heard of these two previously because the coming attraction
included with the videotape claims that they are the most famous lovers of all.
If I was ranking the great lovers of all time, Heathcliff and Cathy would
probably show up at number three on my list behind Romeo and Juliet and Luke
and Laura. To me, the name Heathcliff is the name of an orange cat who is even
less amusing than that other dumb orange cat named Garfield. Whenever things
got kind of sluggish in this movie, I consoled myself that at least I wasn't
having to endure the antics of a retarded dog named Odie.
Based on a book by
Emily Bronte, Wuthering Heights is the name of the house that Cathy and
Heathcliff grow up in. Please try and keep this straight from the book Jane
Eyre, written by her sister Charlotte, about a couple that had relationship
problems at a house named Thornfield. You can keep that one separated from
this one by remembering that it starred Joan Fontaine and Orson Welles instead
of Laurence Olivier and Merle Oberon. You can keep both of these separate from Rebecca which is a movie about a couple who have relationship problems at a house
named Manderley by remembering that it starred Joan Fontaine and Laurence
Olivier. As far as I know that one wasn't written anyone named Bronte, but
there were four other siblings so don't hold me to that. Of the movie versions
of these three novels, this one contains the least amount of action, but was
frankly and unfortunately
the one I most identified with. That doesn't mean that I can say that I liked
or had a particularly good time viewing it. It just means that it held a
mirror up to my very soul and showed me what a twisted and poisoned thing it had
turned into. But at least it wasn't about some damn cat eating lasagna. In an effort to distinguish itself from all the other movies about lost love on
the English moors, this one begins in the middle of a driving blizzard instead
of a driving thunderstorm. I like watching people trudging through fake snow
and looking at model houses in the background of the indoor set this was filmed
on so I was immediately enthralled by it all and waited with baited breath to
see whether this was the set up to a very long flashback. You could pretty
much see it coming once this traveller showed up at Wuthering Heights and
everyone inside was all morose and caked with old-guy and old-gal make-up.  This guy is grudgingly given a room by those there and it isn't long before he
hears a woman's voice howling on the wind outside his room (the old bridal
suite of course). Well, once the man of the house learns that this guy heard a
chick yakking out in the storm, he hauls ass out of the house and into the
blizzard, pursued by another guy who was hanging out at Wuthering Heights.
Traveller looks at old hag and asks what the dude's problem was and who the
lady was he heard. She opens her mouth and utters the words that must have
struck fear into his heart and made his nads shrivel up into his belly button:
"it all began forty years ago!" Forty years ago? How long is this freaking
blizzard going to last? Two weeks? If I was this chap, I would have said to
the
butler, "why don't you go ahead and leave the bottle here at the table and keep
the hot wings coming, cause this sounds a bit involved."
The old lady
starts in with some drivel about how Heathcliff (the guy who went charging out
into the snowstorm) was brought back to Wuthering Heights by Cathy's dad when
he was just a smelly lad running the streets of Liverpool. The details
probably aren't important, because I'm pretty sure that after about three hours
of this tale, the traveller was ready to hit the streets of Wastedville and
didn't much care whether this guy was Heathcliff or a Heath bar.  Cathy's father explains to his two dubious children (Cathy also has a no-good
brother named Hindley) that in life they must be prepared to share their good
fortune with others and that Heathcliff is going to be staying with them.
Cathy and Heathcliff take to one another in fairly short order and the ladies
in the crowd would probably recognize them as being something they like to call
"soulmates". The guys in the crowd know that while the concept of soulmates is
counter to the fact that you'll most likely run into someone better looking
when you're out at the bars the next weekend, that it's to their benefit to go
along with the whole soulmates idea because your soulmate is more likely to let
you into their drawers because since you're soulmates, they're really your
drawers too.
Usually in these movies with little kids (especially English
kids) I'm put off by their wimpy behavior, but in this one I'm going to
give credit where credit is due because both Heathcliff and Hindley showed a
little something more than I had would have guessed (especially from someone
with such an unruly amount of wavy black hair like Heathcliff). These two
don't like each other and Heathcliff comes after Hindley, but Hindley picks up
a good-sized rock and tells him to back off. Heath doesn't and Hindley bounces
the rock off his skull from about three feet away! Heath is busted open, but
swears revenge on Hindley no matter how long it takes. This sets up the
lifelong feud between these two that really gets going once Cathy and Hindley's
dad croaks and Hindley takes over Wuthering Heights, demoting Heath from foster
kid down to stable boy. (Ouch!) In the meantime, Cathy and Heathcliff enjoy
one another's company pretending to be knights and maidens and stuff like that
and even when they get older they are still enamored with one another and hang
out on the moors just enjoying life.  Course Cathy is a woman, so you can imagine that that won't be enough for her.
Oh no. She's got her eyes on a better life. You get the idea that it will be
with Heathcliff if he can get his crap together and develop a taste for
material wealth instead of just being happy with the person he's with, but that
if it turns out that Heathcliff isn't that shallow, she'll find someone else.
The next thing you know, she's hanging out with Edgar Linton at his estate and
complaining to her housekeeper about what a loser Heathcliff is. Heathcliff
overhears this and is pretty upset and goes so far as cut his hands up by
punching out some windows. Thus begins Heathcliff's descent into a journey of
self pity and fury that takes him all the way to America where he makes a bunch
of money and allows him to come back and buy Wuthering Heights out from under
Hindley and to hang around Cathy and Edgar like some type of broken hearted
wraith.
I must say that the remainder of the movie isn't very pleasant to sit
through, chiefly because both Cathy and Heathcliff are self-centered,
self-destructive boobs that ruin the lives of everyone around them in their
efforts to abuse one another's affections. Cathy comes off the worse of the
two, mainly because I could completely understand how Heathcliff felt after
being dicked around by Cathy who alternately pretended that they would always
be together and then would turn around and just drop him on his head. At least
her brother had the decency to stand right in front of him and whack him with a
rock. Heathcliff has given himself completely to her and for her to so
arbitrarily reverse course and go with someone else merely because he could
buy her better dresses and throw lavish parties goes a long way to explain his
increasingly single-mindedly psychotic behavior. (He marries her sister-in-law
merely to punish Cathy and tells her this to her face!) Even though I identify with the anger and the unwillingness to move on with his
life that Heathcliff displays, that doesn't mean that I admire it or find it
all that entertaining to watch. Shoot, I find my obsession with the constant
betrayals in my own life to be increasingly boring and I can't imagine how dull
it must be to those around me, but I'm mentally ill, so you people not only
have to put up with it, you have to feel guilty about not wanting to put up
with it. I mean, I'm all in favor of true love winning out and all that, but
these two were rarely happy in adulthood and spent almost all their time with
other people, so I'm not even sure how this could qualify as a full blown love
affair. The final scene warps
us back to the night of the blizzard where the story began and I guess there's
some type of happy ending for these two, but I have to say that this movie was
just too unpleasant to really recommend wholeheartedly. Laurence Olivier is
full of smoldering rage and intensity and Merle Oberon is a suitably
insensitive bitch in her role of Cathy, but these are two people that just ooze
poison and aren't anyone you would want to be around. This certainly wasn't
any type of sentimental love story about love denied by outside forces or
cultural divides or class warfare or anything like that. Cathy was just a
greedy little pig and went with money and comfort over love leaving Heathcliff
to stew about it the rest of his life. When the old hag finally winds up her
tale, that wayward traveller must have felt like he had a rock bounced off his
baby skull. It sure left a nasty welt on my cranium.
|