A Film Canon

 

 

Emily Brontë's classic novel lends itself well to Wyler's taste for pathologically enlivened chambers, and the sickly, semi-incestual proximity of their inhabitants. Although the second half of the novel is omitted, Heathcliff's (Lawrence Olivier) vengeful dominion over both Wuthering Heights and Thrushcross Grange is consummated in stylistic terms, as Wyler identifies the houses as so many breathless, suffocating constrictions. These are identified with the cinematic frame itself, or at least used as temporary framing devices, explaining the proliferation of windows and doors, as well as a whole host of vertical domestic objects, including candlesticks, bedposts and bottles. Heathcliff's own exemption from this constriction is emphasised both by the truncated ending, and by Gregg Toland's deep-focus cinematography, with which he is effectively identified, particularly whenever he is breaking the surface of his supposed subordination, itself identified with everything in the supposed 'background'. For this reason, he is ultimately a more sympathetic character than in the novel, while Catherine Earnshaw (Merle Oberon) is less so, her romantic oscillations between him and wealthy Edgar Linton (David Niven) taking on a proportionately callous, petulant quality. Nevertheless, their radical identification with each other remains unaltered, such that there is no net change in sympathy, nor in its indistinguishability from claustrophobia - a paradoxical scenario encapsulated in the status of the moorland as both stormy rationale for, and breezy respite from, domestic insularity.