G
Guest
Guest
During my early adolescence this film ruined my chances for a good relationship with men for about twenty years (then I figured out, or was forced to accept, that "romantic" love was a crock of crappola). But I can still watch this film and suspend my reason for a little while (guilty pleasure of a feminist).
One of my fave scenes, now that I'm an adult: After seducing Isabella/Geraldine Fitzgerald to fall totally nuts in love with him, so that she is tortured with romantic/sexual frustration, Heathcliff/Olivier looks down at her pathetic face and says with utter tenderness (my recollection, not a quote), "Why do I look into your eyes, and see . . . nothing? Why are your eyes always empty?" Fuuuuuuuucccck!
Perdita
Why I love Wuthering Heights - Lucy Mangan, July 28, 2004, The Guardian
Not the song. Not the Ralph Fiennes/Juliette Binoche 1992 cinematic debacle. Not, above all, that bloody book where 800 characters share two houses, three names and such wearying propensity for running across the moors to escape their spiritual agony that you long to beat them all to death with a coal scuttle.
No, I'm talking about the 1939 film version. So unashamedly romantic, so gloriously melodramatic is it that my heart is revivified at every viewing. Everything about it is perfect. It stars Merle Oberon as Cathy, so raven-haired and porcelain-skinned that she makes Sophie Ellis-Bextor look like a smallpox victim. She gets to bounce her ringlets for ages (either from lust or fury) before dying of Hollywood disease - you get more beautiful and shiny-eyed until you expire under the weight of your own loveliness.
And who's that she's clutching on her deathbed? Yes! It's Laurence "Hewn from the Living Rock" Olivier, beside whom all other men look like failed factory models. His Heathcliff makes Mr Darcy look like Keith Chegwin, and because it's 1939, before cynicism started poisoning the waters of life, he gets to stride around in torment and tight britches delivering such lines as: "You loved me! What right to throw love away? For a handful of worldliness!" I've no idea what a handful of worldliness is, but I'm absolutely sure, Cathy, it wasn't worth missing a single one of the smouldering looks he shot you through his ever-thickening miasma of testosterone and despair. Silly moo.
It's not that they don't make them like they used to. It's that they can't. What (post-) modern audience is going to sit through a film about unconsummated, undying passion that relies only on the paltry resource of words? And who could we find among today's spindly pretty-boy actors to cry out "Cathy, Cathy come back! I cannot live without my life - I cannot die without my soul!"
One of my fave scenes, now that I'm an adult: After seducing Isabella/Geraldine Fitzgerald to fall totally nuts in love with him, so that she is tortured with romantic/sexual frustration, Heathcliff/Olivier looks down at her pathetic face and says with utter tenderness (my recollection, not a quote), "Why do I look into your eyes, and see . . . nothing? Why are your eyes always empty?" Fuuuuuuuucccck!
Perdita
Why I love Wuthering Heights - Lucy Mangan, July 28, 2004, The Guardian
Not the song. Not the Ralph Fiennes/Juliette Binoche 1992 cinematic debacle. Not, above all, that bloody book where 800 characters share two houses, three names and such wearying propensity for running across the moors to escape their spiritual agony that you long to beat them all to death with a coal scuttle.
No, I'm talking about the 1939 film version. So unashamedly romantic, so gloriously melodramatic is it that my heart is revivified at every viewing. Everything about it is perfect. It stars Merle Oberon as Cathy, so raven-haired and porcelain-skinned that she makes Sophie Ellis-Bextor look like a smallpox victim. She gets to bounce her ringlets for ages (either from lust or fury) before dying of Hollywood disease - you get more beautiful and shiny-eyed until you expire under the weight of your own loveliness.
And who's that she's clutching on her deathbed? Yes! It's Laurence "Hewn from the Living Rock" Olivier, beside whom all other men look like failed factory models. His Heathcliff makes Mr Darcy look like Keith Chegwin, and because it's 1939, before cynicism started poisoning the waters of life, he gets to stride around in torment and tight britches delivering such lines as: "You loved me! What right to throw love away? For a handful of worldliness!" I've no idea what a handful of worldliness is, but I'm absolutely sure, Cathy, it wasn't worth missing a single one of the smouldering looks he shot you through his ever-thickening miasma of testosterone and despair. Silly moo.
It's not that they don't make them like they used to. It's that they can't. What (post-) modern audience is going to sit through a film about unconsummated, undying passion that relies only on the paltry resource of words? And who could we find among today's spindly pretty-boy actors to cry out "Cathy, Cathy come back! I cannot live without my life - I cannot die without my soul!"
