Perry Kate Very very predictable, including the post credit scene !!!

Noutions Good movie, but best of all time? Hardly . . .

Micransix Crappy film

Mathilde the Guild Although I seem to have had higher expectations than I thought, the movie is super entertaining.

jc-osms Wonderful Golden Age Hollywood treatment of Emily Bronte's immortal novel, you know it's going to be good just from the initial titles as names like Laurence Olivier, Flora Robson, William Wyler, Greg Toland and many other greats pass by. The evocation of place is superbly realised so that you never doubt you're in the bleakly beautiful Yorkshire landscape which forms such an evocative background to events as they play out on the screenThe film retains the basic framework of the book with the traveller's dead-of-winter visit to an embittered Heathcliffe's house leading to Flora Robson's maid flash-backing us into the main story of the doomed, tragic love between childhood sweethearts Heathcliffe and Cathy as they push and pull themselves into adulthood, collaterally damaging different members of the neighbouring rich Linton family who fall into their orbit.For me the best acting was actually by Dame Flora Robson as the faithful retainer Mary who wants the best for both of her charges, but who has her loyalties tested in their on-off-on love-hate relationship. She clearly has little time for the cruel, wastrel older brother Linley played effectively by Hugh Williams in a likely pen-portrait of the older Bronte brother Branwell. Olivier takes some time to settle into his role and leave his exaggerated stage mannerisms behind him but eventually succeeds by applying the less-is-more dictum, his dark brooding personality in the end dominating the piece and setting the mark by which all his successors in the role will be rated. I was slightly less impressed with Merle Oberon as Cathy, insofar despite a committed performance, she lacks real beauty in her face and never quite convinces us of her character's magnetic personality. David Niven is surprisingly insipid as the snobbish, besotted Linton in an admittedly underwritten part but Geraldine Chaplin is better as his feisty sister who deliberately subjugates herself to Heathcliffe, content to accept the scraps from his table.The whole however is masterfully directed by director Wyler and wonderfully filmed by camera-man Toland, whose sharp, deep-focus black and white cinematography, both in exterior and interior locations, adds so much to the narrative. It's a good thing when a classic novel gets the film treatment it deserves and that's certainly the case here.

Coventry I have a couple of confessions to make for starters, actually. The first confession is that I have never read the Emily Brontë novel and the second that this is also only just the very first film adaptation of the legendary story that I watched. Since there isn't a point in reading a book after having seen the film, and since I'm pretty convinced that none of the other hundred or so film versions can surpass this fantastic 1939 version, it will probably remain and one and only acquaintance with "Wuthering Heights". How to describe the events taking place in this immortal story? Well, I believe Charles Bukowski described it best with the title of his own work "Love is a dog from hell"… It's a love story, but an utmost depressing and melancholic one, with loathsome characters as well as gloomy decors and mournful dialogs all around, but simultaneously all this is also exactly why it's MY type of love story! Just like in that other cinematic milestone from the same wondrous year 1939, "Gone with the Wind", this is more tragedy than romance and you certainly don't have to expect an overload of mellifluous situations or a happy-happy-joy-joy denouement. Perfectionist director William Wyler was the ideal man to turn the legendary novel into a milestone motion picture, because even though the British roots are missing and there isn't much attention given to the role of the rural setting, he does provide the film with a strong atmosphere of morbidity. Allegedly the production process of "Wuthering Heights" wasn't a very pleasant time for everyone involved, neither. The cast and crew quickly got fed up with the endless number of takes that the perfectionist director demanded, the director wasn't enthusiast to work for a producer – Samuel Goldwyn – that usually only makes bland movies and, most of all, the star actor Laurence Olivier and star actress Merle Oberon couldn't stand each other. I'm convinced, however, that all these tensions contributed to the fact that "Wuthering Heights" became such a flawless and influential classic. Oberon depicts a despicable character, as Cathy is a selfish and capricious shrew, but she does it wonderfully. And even though Laurence Olivier's Heathcliff is fundamentally a creepy and disturbing psychopath, he's still one of the most desirably male characters in the history of cinema. Just ask Kate Bush

Prismark10 This was Laurence Olivier's introduction to an American cinema audience. An actor who has arrived from the English stage with a big reputation. I can only imagine the shock and awe the audience felt when they saw his Heatcliff. Its akin to what modern cinema audience in the 1970s felt when they first saw Robert De Niro or Al Pacino at full throttle. Olivier is wild fury, he brings his character alive and a style of acting that to many would had been alien outside of gangster films of the 1930s.This version of Wuthering Heights only adapts the first half of the book. I think this is the right decision. We can concentrate on the young gypsy boy always treated as an outcast who meets his soul mate in Cathy (Merle Oberon) which blossoms in the wild Yorkshire Moors but they are doomed never to be together.Oberon and Olivier drive this film with a wild, dark, even a supernatural fashion. The cinematography is splendid and so are some of the side characters and the great David Niven is put in the shade in this movie.There have been countless adaptations of the novel but this is a must see.

dougdoepke Talk about a brooding outdoors, those moody moors may represent a sense of liberation for the lovers, but they're not exactly inviting. Besides, it rains all the time, so best to be in the house even if mansions represent the confining space of class and class privilege. That's the trouble. Cathy is 'to the manor born', as they say. Thus she's really torn between the wild outdoors and the comforts of ballrooms and servants. Then there's the enigmatic Heathcliffe, a dark wild-souled type guy, perfectly at home in those bleak rolling hills. He was a street ragamuffin before Cathy's elderly father adopted him into the manor as a stable boy. But he and a young Cathy manage to bond despite the class difference, a bond that eventually blossoms into true love. But that true love only breaks to the surface in the wild outdoors where a common humanity replaces artificial social distinctions. If only Cathy could find the will to break free of the leisure class.What a great visual experience, the b&w expertly coordinated with the settings. When the two lovers approach the rocky crag, there's almost a feeling of an outdoor altar calling to them amidst the brooding hills. It's such a perfect visual contrast to the high-key ballrooms and parlors of the Lintons. The Lintons, however, are not to be despised despite their airs and privileges. In fact, they are very real victims of Cathy's suppressed feelings and Heathcliffe's cold calculations. As it turns out, there is no spectral salvation for them. As a result, the love being portrayed here is a kind of mad love, one that brings tragedy to all concerned. Thus, there's a reason those moors brood in dark fashion, while the movie itself remains the best of the many makes and remakes.