Wuthering Heights (1939)

Overview

Wuthering Heights (1939) is a haunting and impassioned distillation of one of English literature’s most turbulent love stories.

Directed by William Wyler and produced by Samuel Goldwyn, this adaptation focuses on the first half of Emily Brontë’s 1847 novel, streamlining its sprawling, multi-generational narrative into a sharply focused, 104-minute romantic tragedy.

Starring Laurence Olivier as Heathcliff and Merle Oberon as Cathy Earnshaw, the film transforms Brontë’s emotionally violent novel into a brooding Hollywood romance.

Though it omits the second generation of characters, the film stands as a landmark in studio-era literary adaptation, notable for its intense performances, atmospheric visuals, and melodramatic energy.

Plot Summary: Love in the Moors, and in the Grave

The story opens with a snowstorm. A traveller, Mr. Lockwood, takes refuge in the windswept mansion of Wuthering Heights. There, he meets the cold and haunted Heathcliff and experiences a ghostly vision of a woman named Cathy calling out to him. The housekeeper, Ellen Dean, recounts the tragic history of the place:

Years earlier, the Earnshaw family adopted a dark-skinned, ragged orphan named Heathcliff. Raised as a brother to Cathy and Hindley, Heathcliff and Cathy form a bond of wild, untamed love. However, when their father dies, Hindley reduces Heathcliff to the status of a servant.

Cathy, torn between her love for Heathcliff and her desire for social advancement, marries the wealthy but gentle Edgar Linton. Devastated and enraged, Heathcliff vanishes—only to return years later, now rich, educated, and bent on revenge.

As he wreaks emotional havoc on those who wronged him, his obsession with Cathy never dims. But fate intervenes, and Cathy dies—leaving Heathcliff to wander Wuthering Heights, consumed by her ghost and the moors they once roamed together.

Performances: Star-Crossed and Smouldering

Laurence Olivier as Heathcliff

In his first major Hollywood role, Laurence Olivier delivers a performance of brooding intensity and tortured grandeur. While Brontë’s Heathcliff is often characterized by his savagery and barely-repressed violence, Olivier tempers that rawness with a melancholy romanticism.

His clipped diction and disdain for melodrama bring a stage-trained precision to the role, although he famously clashed with director Wyler during filming, claiming he was uncomfortable with the cinematic style.

Nonetheless, Olivier’s Heathcliff is a brooding outsider, seething with passion and resentment—a performance that helped catapult him to international stardom and earned him an Academy Award nomination for Best Actor.

Merle Oberon as Cathy Earnshaw

Merle Oberon portrays Cathy as torn, capricious, and ultimately tragic.

Her Cathy is a woman trapped between love and societal expectation, and while her delivery can be a bit mannered by today’s standards, her emotional range is evident. Oberon brings elegance and fire to the role, though she reportedly struggled with Wyler’s exacting direction.

Oberon and Olivier’s offscreen friction is well-documented, yet their on-screen chemistry burns with that same tension. There is both love and loathing in their exchanges—exactly as Brontë wrote them.

David Niven and Supporting Cast

David Niven as Edgar Linton is well-cast as the gentle but uncomprehending foil to Heathcliff.

While Edgar is the safe choice for Cathy, Niven infuses him with a quiet dignity rather than simply making him a weak alternative.

Geraldine Fitzgerald (in her Oscar-nominated role) as Isabella Linton, and Flora Robson as the housekeeper Ellen Dean, provide emotional ballast and narrative grounding to the otherwise tempestuous central relationship.

Direction and Cinematography: Gothic Romanticism on Screen

Director William Wyler, known for his perfectionism, brings a sense of visual lyricism to the film. Collaborating with legendary cinematographer Gregg Toland (who would go on to shoot Citizen Kane), the film achieves a striking visual style: deep shadows, windblown moors, and chiaroscuro lighting that elevate the melodrama into something dreamlike and mythic.

The sets and matte paintings conjure a Gothic Yorkshire landscape that feels mythic in scale and almost expressionistic in tone. The indoor sequences at Wuthering Heights are claustrophobic and dim, while the moors feel wild and untamed—symbolic of the protagonists' inner turmoil.

Wyler, not typically associated with romance, directs with emotional restraint, which occasionally clashes with the story’s volcanic passions. But the film's controlled pace and quiet melancholy work in tandem with the cinematography to create a hypnotic tone.

Adaptation Choices: Elegance at the Cost of Depth

The film’s most significant change from Brontë’s novel is its decision to end the story with Cathy’s death, omitting the entire second half involving the next generation. This choice simplifies the narrative but also shifts the novel’s focus from the cyclical nature of revenge and trauma to a more conventional love story.

This adaptation turns the novel into a tragic romance rather than a gothic family saga. While some critics view this as a dilution, it arguably gives the film a focused emotional arc, culminating in one of cinema’s most mournful, iconic final lines:

“I am going to join her. After all, she’s only been dead a little while.”

Still, for those familiar with the novel, the omission of the second generation may feel like a loss of thematic richness and moral closure.

Themes and Subtext: Love as Haunting

Obsession vs. Affection: This isn’t a tale of healthy love—Heathcliff and Cathy are obsessed with each other, and the film doesn’t shy away from the destructive consequences of that passion.

Class and Alienation: Heathcliff is defined by his outsider status—likely Roma in origin, possibly mixed-race (he is described in the novel as “dark-skinned”), and always viewed as inferior. The film softens but doesn’t erase this, casting him as a romantic underdog.

Nature vs. Society: The moors are a symbol of wild, untamed feeling, while the estates of the Linton's represent order, wealth, and repression.

Life After Death: The ghostly framing device of the film, and its tragic ending, leans heavily into the gothic—suggesting that love, no matter how tortured, endures beyond the grave.

Reception and Legacy

Upon release, Wuthering Heights received critical acclaim and was nominated for eight Academy Awards, including Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor (Olivier), and Best Supporting Actress (Fitzgerald). It won Best Cinematography (Black and White) for Gregg Toland.

Over time, the film has become a touchstone of Hollywood romanticism. While literary purists may take issue with its condensation of the source material, few can deny its atmospheric power and emotional impact.

In 2007, the American Film Institute ranked it #73 on its list of the 100 greatest American films, and in 1983, it was selected for preservation by the Library of Congress in the U.S. National Film Registry.

Final Verdict

Wuthering Heights (1939) is not a faithful recreation of Brontë’s entire novel, but it is a masterclass in emotional atmosphere and cinematic craftsmanship. William Wyler’s direction, combined with Olivier’s tortured charisma and Toland’s haunting cinematography, captures the essence of doomed passion in a way few films have before or since.

It’s not the full story—but what it tells, it tells beautifully: a tale of love so fierce it defies time, reason, and even death.