Wuthering Heights (1978)

Directed by: Peter Hammond | 250 minutes | drama, romance | Actors: Richard Kay, Ken Hutchinson, Cathryn Harrison, David Wilkinson, David Robb, Caroline Langrishe, Brian Wilde, Kay Adshead, John Collin, Patricia Healey, Pat Heywood, Paul Dawkins, John Duttine, Maggie Wilkinson, Dennis Burgess, Wendy Williams

Almost everyone knows the tragic story of Heathcliff and Catherine, described in Emilie Brontë’s book Wuthering Heights. The story has been acted out, filmed and even sung about several times. This 1978 version is a five-part series made into a BBC film. BBC film adaptations are generally well known because they stay close to the atmosphere and story of the book and adapt it tastefully. As for the story, the BBC has also stayed close to the book in this series.

Mister Lockwood (Kay) – the new tenant of Thrusscross Grange – encounters a dark, blunt and almost aggressive group of people in Wuthering Heights when he stops by to meet his landlord Mister Heathcliff (Hutchinson). When he wants to go home in the evening through the snow, but is afraid that he cannot find his way back, no one wants to accompany him and he stays the night. In his sleep he is tormented by bad dreams and the ghost of Catherine Earnshaw (Adshead). From that moment on we go back to the past, where young Heathcliff is taken in by the Earnshaw family. He is despised by Hindley (Duttine), the son, but slowly grows closer to Catherine, the daughter. When the father dies, Hindley takes over the household. He humiliates Heathcliff, who can only serve as a servant. Heathcliff becomes very embittered by this and becomes increasingly distant from Cathy, who increasingly associates with the neighbours, the Linton family.

Heathcliff has to deal with another disappointment when he overhears a conversation between Cathy and the maid Ellen (Heywood), in which Cathy reveals that she said yes to a proposal from Edgar Linton (Robb). She has done this because she feels Heathcliff is no match for her now that he has been degraded too much by her brother. She marries Edgar and Heathcliff flees and stays away for three years. When he returns, he finds Hindley drowning in alcohol because his wife has died. Heathcliff himself has become a wealthy man through shady practices and takes advantage of Hindley’s alcoholism by gambling Wuthering Heights from him. When he starts to visit Cathy regularly again, Isabella Linton appears to be interested in him. Cathy manipulatively tries to keep Heathcliff to himself, but when he seems to lose his heart to Isabella (Langrishe), Cathy slowly but surely goes insane.

The dark atmosphere that is so characteristic of the book is well incorporated in the film. The overall sense of disappointment in all the characters and the destructive way they deal with it is palpable. One drowns in alcohol, the other in aggression and the next in mean games. Hutchinson portrays Heathcliff well as a bitter and secretive man who takes revenge on everyone he feels has offended him. Adshead convincingly portrays Cathy as a manipulative and jealous woman, who cannot bear her own character and eventually falls to herself. But the downside to such a story and such characters is that actors are prone to over-acting. The characters in ‘Wuthering Heights’ scream too often and laugh too much. The biggest flaw of this series, however, is the way it’s filmed. The outdoor images of the atmospheric English landscape were shot on film, but the studio images were shot with video and the decor and lighting are so simple that it almost looks like you’re watching a stage. The images are intermixed and this creates such a big difference in realism that it is disturbing and takes you out of the story. And this is a shame, because because of this the outdated techniques still leave too much of an impression on the series. The good elaboration of the story is therefore too often overlooked, with the result that the series is not the atmospheric film adaptation it could have been.