Hollywood has always loved a star-studded literary adaptation. William Wyler’s ultra-romantic 1939 reworking of Emily Brontë’s terrifyingly powerful novel still sweeps audiences away 85 years later, remaining faithful in spirit yet smartly adapting to on-screen storytelling.
Some alterations sand down the book’s sharpest edges (the Hays Code was in effect), but most work within the medium to create a rich 105-minute narrative. The worst cruelties endured and inflicted by Wuthering Heights’ inhabitants are softened, notably the behaviours of star-crossed lovers Catherine (Merle Oberon) and Heathcliff (Laurence Olivier). Here, they are tortured but it falls short of monstrous. Extensive time is devoted to their burgeoning romance and private world on the moors. Alfred Newman’s score gives Cathy a light, bright strings motif while turning the same instruments moody, almost sinister for Heathcliff. The film excises the novel’s second half and generation, keeping focus – and full sympathy – on the doomed romance.
Audiences in 1939, however, would not have known that a star’s offscreen life mirrored Brontë’s novel. Heathcliff’s outsider status is established not only from his lack of history – Mr Earnshaw says he found the boy on the streets of Liverpool ‘kicked and bruised and almost dead’ – but from others describing his darker skin. In the late 18th century, Liverpool’s port was a hub of colonial commerce; Heathcliff could have arrived as a passenger, stowaway, or slaved person. This gives Hindley Earnshaw and Edgar Linton’s abuse of Healthcliff a racially charged edge; Heathcliff’s vicious desire to assimilate and take revenge on his tormentors becomes a quest for justice.
Olivier is the whitewashed Hollywood Heathcliff, albeit an excellently brooding one. However, Oberon – even more captivating as Cathy – was mixed race and faced an entirely different industry experience to her co-stars. Born in Mumbai (then Bombay) as the daughter of a British officer and a woman of mixed Sri Lankan origin, she concealed her South Asian heritage in 1930s Hollywood, using skin lightening products that damaged her health. Oberon became the first actress of Asian descent to receive a Best Actress Academy Award nomination for The Dark Angel (1935). By the time of Wuthering Heights she was a star at Samuel Goldwyn Productions. Wuthering Heights received eight Academy Awards nominations, including Best Actor for Olivier; strikingly, Best Actress was not among them. It is not hard to believe that, while Oberon’s box office pull was not affected by gossip, the Hollywood elite found one nomination enough for an outsider.
Cathy imagines a past for Heathcliff: his father was the Emperor of China and his mother an Indian queen. When he returns a ‘gentleman’ after his travels, he echoes this back to her: ‘I went out and claimed my inheritance. It all turned out just as you once suspected, Cathy: that I had been kidnapped by wicked sailors and brought to England; that I was of noble birth.’ Her fantasy becomes his reclamation. By honouring the bigotry Oberon faced and confirming her place in Hollywood annals, we can broaden understandings of film history and examine the industry’s progress – and lack thereof. Watching Wuthering Heights today, the tragedy of Oberon needing to hide herself is equal to the tragedy on screen. Cathy’s pride and desire to keep with her fellow landed gentry drives her from Heathcliff, then to madness and death. Heathcliff, seeing a futile future, seeks to mire everyone in his misery. Their uncontrollable, unhealthy passion brings about their inevitable end. However, Goldwyn requested a specific final shot: Cathy and Heathcliff as ghosts, free of societal judgement and their own worst selves to wander their beloved moors forever. It is a strange, sad hope, yet, it’s hope nonetheless.
Carmen Paddock
Film and culture journalist
