10 Greatest ‘Wuthering Heights’ Adaptations, Ranked

Just like Cathy’s ghost, adaptations of Wuthering Heights turn up when you least expect them to haunt a new generation. The latest iteration comes from Promising Young Woman and Saltburn director Emerald Fennell, starring Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi as doomed couple Catherine Earnshaw and Heathcliff. It’s already angered disparate chunks of the internet for various reasons, including: overt bodice-ripping, too-bright lighting, casting of Attractive White People as the leads, knocking off the Gone With the Wind poster for advertising, too-slick design, Charli XCX soundtrack, and, it cannot be overstated, sexing up of a sexless text. I can’t do better than the author par excellence of modern Gothic, Daphne Du Maurier, in arguing against Wuthering Heights’ description as a “supreme romantic novel.” In 1971’s Buffalo News she says “there is more savagery, more brutality, in the pages of Wuthering Heights than in any novel of the nineteenth Century, and for good measure, more beauty too, more poetry, and what is more unusual, a complete lack of sexual emotion…The emotion is elemental like the wind on Wuthering Heights.”

But it’s not like Fennell is the first person, or even the tenth, to try their hand at adapting Emily Brontë’s sole novel. Over the decades, there have been multiple adaptations of the classic tale most people forgot after being forced to read it in high school. Wuthering Heights is a strange text, featuring stories-within-stories, years passing between events, and potentially unreliable narrators giving secondhand accounts. Most film versions jettison the novel’s second-generation second half in favor of the “love story” in the first, giving a lopsided impression of the original. But that’s the fun and frustration of book adaptations, balancing between complete fealty to the source material and modifying it to stand on its own. Here are ten adaptations that, while not always honoring Emily Brontë’s original Wuthering Heights, at least do something interesting with it.

10

‘Wuthering Heights’ (2003)

Image via MTV

Back in the 2000s, studios could not get enough of giving classics a hip, fresh millennium update. Once they ran through Shakespeare – with films like Hamlet (2000), 10 Things I Hate About You, O, and She’s The Man, to name a few – they turned to high school English. And so, Wuthering Heights becomes The Heights, a lighthouse overlooking the Pacific Ocean, dark Heathcliff becomes blonde rocker Heath, and Hindley becomes Hendrix. A young Katherine Heigl plays Isabel Linton as Sarah Michelle Geller’s Cruel Intentions character, and no less than John Doe of L.A. punk band X plays the Earnshaw patriarch. Punk band MxPx also make an appearance, with lead singer Mike Herrera and Heigl, both wearing piles of eyeliner, making out in a car post-show.

Most importantly, this version was produced by musician Jim Steinman, best known for penning the Celine Dion megahit “It’s All Coming Back To Me Now”, itself based on Steinman’s favorite book, Wuthering Heights. The soundtrack features actors singing a medley of Steinman hits, including Meatloaf’s “The Future Ain’t What It Used To Be”, and Sisters of Mercy’s “More”, used as Heath and Cate’s “secret song”. To say this Wuthering Heights takes liberties is like saying the Pacific is a large body of water, but for pure Y2K cheese, you can’t beat it.

9

‘Wuthering Heights’ (1992)

Image via Paramount Pictures

Featuring Ralph Fiennes in first studio film role as Heathcliff, and Juliette Binoche as Catherine, this is the first film version to cram in the novel’s full story instead of cutting off after Cathy’s death in the first half. The movie has lots of promising elements, including filming on the actual Yorkshire moors, a Ryuichi Sakamoto score, and a surprisingly uncredited Sinead O’Connor bracketing the film as Emily Brontë.

But Binoche’s dual role as two generations of Catherines underscores her shaky accent, and while she nails “headstrong”, she and Fiennes don’t convince as eternal twin souls. Though director Steven Spielberg, speaking to Time, said Fiennes’ Heathcliff “was a feral man, a kind of grownup Wild Child”, impressing him enough to test Fiennes for Amon Goeth in Schindler’s List. Make of that what you will for Wuthering Height’s accuracy in portraying Heathcliff’s brutality.

8

‘Wuthering Heights’ (1967)

Image via BBC

Thanks to the BBC’s policy of wiping and recycling its master tapes, the original color broadcast of this four-part adaptation no longer exists, but at least you can watch Ian McShane (Deadwood) and Angela Scoular (Casino Royale) in brooding, slightly blurred black and white. This faithful adaptation follows the full novel, including the rarest inclusion: telling, but not showing, Heathcliff and Catherine’s ghosts wandering the moors, a convention no other direct adaptation seems able to resist.

The leads are convincingly selfish and obsessed, the Lintons appropriately passive and milquetoast, and even normally minimized characters like Nellie (here, Ellen) and Hindley come off as more complex and sympathetic than truncated adaptations allow for. If you can overlook the one-take staginess and occasional claustrophobia of live television formatting (including the odd switching to film whenever any character steps outside), and don’t feel like picking up the book, this is the version to watch.

7

‘Sparkhouse’ (2002)

Image via BBC

This modern BBC miniseries take on Wuthering Heights is a very loose adaptation, starting with the gender-inversion of Heathcliff to Carol (Sarah Smart), and Cathy to Andrew (Joe McFadden). Childhood friends now in love, Andrew’s snobby family doesn’t approve of Carol, her younger sister Lisa (Holly Grainger), or her abusive dad Richard (Alun Armstrong). Carol and Lisa disappear after Andrew’s parents reveal Carol’s terrible secret, and after a few years, Andrew marries nice Becky, only for Carol to return, take over her family farm, and marry farmhand John (Richard Armitage) for his money.

It’s a loose sketch of the source material, with emphasis on how love can curdle to obsession, but necessity can also bloom genuine affection. It’s an emotional rollercoaster, with plot twists that could read as so clichéd or soap opera they take you out of the story, but if you’re looking for something without starched collars and bodices, this will do very nicely.

6

‘Wuthering Heights’ (2011)

Image via Curzon Artificial Eye

And here’s a period piece that manages to be completely modern through technique. Director Andrea Arnold (American Honey, Bird) foregoes music and much dialogue to focus on the tactile aspects of life on the moors. It’s also the rare adaptation to cast a non-white actor as Heathcliff, specified in the novel as “a dark-skinned gypsy in aspect, in dress and manners a gentleman.” The film is intimate and abstract, not the version to watch if you’re trying to get the Cliff’s Notes version of the novel, but absolutely one to drop you into the elemental heart of the story.

The film’s first half, fully immersed in the bleak grime of daily life on the moors, might be too bleak for those expecting a classic, or any romance, really. Switching out actors for the second half jolts the momentum built, but if you’re looking for a visceral watch, this Wuthering Heights is the one.

5

‘Wuthering Heights’ (1939)

Image via MGM Studios

William Wyler’s version, starring Merle Oberon as Catherine and Laurence Oliver as Heathcliff, is considered the definitive film adaptation of Wuthering Heights, to its credit and detriment. It focuses only on the first half of the novel, but includes outsider Lockwood coming to visit, and the nesting stories told by housekeeper Nellie. There’s passion aplenty, but it’s also the definition of Golden Era Hollywood melodrama, which might read as corny to uninitiated audiences.

Wyler hated the film’s final scene of Cathy and Heathcliff’s ghosts walking hand in hand on the moor and didn’t want to do it, but was overridden by producer Samuel Goldwyn. Since primary filming was already completed, with Oberon and Olivier on other projects, doubles filled in as the ghosts. The scene permanently altered the perception of Cathy’s haunting in all subsequent Wuthering Heights versions as undying love returning, instead of furious protection hounding Heathcliff to his grave for trying to mangle her daughter’s life.

4

‘Hurlevent’ (1985)

Image via ALMF

French New Wave director Jacques Rivette takes a deliberate break from his earlier freeform, experimental works with this stripped-down take on Brönte. Inspired by and based on 1930s etchings by artist Balthus for a French edition of Wuthering Heights, the film is cool and detached, with austere sets. Foregoing his rotating cast of regulars, Rivette chose relative unknowns to play Catherine, Roch (Heathcliff), Guillaume (Hindley) and the Lindons (Lintons), explaining in a Senses of Cinema interview, “I wondered why nobody had ever made a movie in which Catherine and Heathcliff were the age they actually are in the novel. Because in the Wyler movie they are 30 and in the Buñuel movie 30 or 40… So I felt like making a movie with some very young actors.”

Rivette focuses on the first half of Wuthering Heights, emphasizing Catherine’s struggle choosing between Roch and Olivier (Edgar) as the difficulty of reconciling her desire to join material society and the alterations to her nature it requires. The film is structured around dream sequences at the start, middle, and end – two reframed from the text and one entirely new. They play identical to the film’s reality, intentionally conflating the two to devastating effect, particularly at the film’s end, when Roch desperately wants the dream to be true. The blurring, along with the novice acting, adds the distancing effect lost by effacing the novel’s framing of the story between a total outsider and an outsider with skin in the game.

3

‘Abismos de Pasión’ (1954)

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Luis Buñuel’s go-for-broke version also nixes the framing, opening his Wuthering Heights with most versions’ midpoint – newly wealthy Alejandro (Heathcliff) returning to his childhood home to get revenge on those who humiliated him. Abismos de Pasión is a surprisingly faithful adaptation, with the original’s repressed Protestantism versus free paganism now a Manichean struggle. Alejandro’s accused of having made a pact with the Devil, and Catalina (Cathy) says she loves him “more than the salvation of my soul,” scandalous to any Roman Catholic audience.

Buñuel’s fondness for poking at bourgeois smugness has Eduardo (Edward) pinning down live butterflies and Isabel casually shooting vultures, while Catalina and Eduardo accept their damnation. By narrowing the story, Buñuel captures Wuthering Height’s cruelties most other versions tamp down in favor of a romantic angle. Like a ludicrous perfume commercial, it’s not love…it’s obsession.

2

‘Onimaru (Arashi ga oka) (Wuthering Heights)’ (1988)

Image via Toho

Yoshishige Yoshida’s brilliant version resets Wuthering Heights onto a barren volcanic plateau in feudal Japan, with families isolated not by distance but taboo – holy keepers of the serpent god, the Yamabes must stay on the mountain. Clan houses East (Wuthering Heights) and West (Thrushcross Grange) split over becoming versus defeating the Serpent, isolating them further. Enter Onibaba (Heathcliff, played by Yûsaku Matsuda), brought in from the city by East’s patriarch for his “boldness”, in contrast with son Hidemaru’s (Hindley) stuffy elitism. Of all Wuthering Heights adaptations, Kinu feels truest to the novel’s Cathy, imprisoned by limitations even more restrictive than general society (fuming as she’s locked in an isolated hut during menstruation, for example), willful and proud. Kinu makes the best choice available to her, in this case to “live as a true woman” by marrying into West house.

Like Buñuel, by heavily transposing the film to his country, Yoshida captures the novel’s bleak, elemental, gothic intensity better than typical period pieces. Everything and everyone is cursed. Kinu’s haunting isn’t love, but protection of her family, promising to drag Onimaru to hell. With Onimaru’s growing corpse obsession in a world rotten and cracking under the weight of tradition, he’s already there.

1

Kate Bush “Wuthering Heights”

Image via EMI

Oh, you didn’t think we were skipping the obvious, did you? If you’re like me, it’s been stuck in your head this entire article. The debut single from Kate Bush’s first album, The Kick Inside, was written in just a few hours, after 18-year-old Bush saw the earlier-mentioned 1967 BBC adaptation of Wuthering Heights. Coincidentally, Bush shares a birthday with Wuthering Heights author Emily Brontë. She also shares Brontë’s gift for stark poetry, summing up the tension of opposing desires often mistaken for romance between Heathcliff and Cathy as “you had a temper like my jealousy / too hot, too greedy.”

Bush’s song cuts through the original Wuthering Heights’ layers of narration, singing first-person from Cathy’s point of view about a need to possess Heathcliff, the other half of her soul, someone she doesn’t always like, but eternally needs. “Wuthering Heights” captures the novel’s harsh beauty in a mere four minutes, with two amazing dance number music videos to boot.

Wuthering Heights

Release Date

April 7, 1939

Runtime

104 Minutes

Director

William Wyler

Writers

Charles MacArthur, Ben Hecht, Emily Brontë, John Huston

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  Laurence Olivier

  Heathcliff

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