Wuthering Heights

1939 drama

Rating: 15/20

Plot: A doomed romance in the titular location.

"Laugh now, Heathcliff. There is no laughter in hell."

Despite being an English major, I was not familiar with this story at all and therefore did not realize how dark it would be. I also didn't realize that the main character was named after a cartoon cat, an odd move by whichever Bronte sister wrote this if you ask me. With a relentless score and breathlessly spoken, completely unnatural lines, this suffers a bit from being a movie from the 1930's, but it is unique for having such unlikable characters and for forcing them to be completely miserable for the duration of the movie. They're all haunted. Eventually, some of them are literally haunted by actual ghosts, but during the flashbacks, they're haunted by the ghosts of this idealized childhood romance.

This might be an unpopular opinion, but I didn't think Laurence Olivier was very good at all in this. He spends the entire movie scowling, a word that is even used at one point by another character, and there's something so stiff about him. He doesn't have chemistry with Merle Oberon, and apparently, the actors hated each other when the camera was rolling. So the relationship at the heart of this thing lacks credibility. It's also hard to buy the ravings of the dying woman at the end of the movie, and there's some genuinely awful acting (I'm talking objectively awful here) as the characters are looking out of a window near the end of the film.

The film looks good, and I did like an incredibly awkward scene where a lady is rocking Mozart on a harpsichord.