I figure it’s time for me to review the big Wuthering Heights movie — no, no, not that Wuthering Heights, though maybe, since it’s out on streaming now, sometime this summer we’ll do a video snark-along for our Patreon subscribers. Stay tuned! For now, I’m starting with the OG, the first major film adaption of Emily Brontë’s novel, Wuthering Heights (1939). There was a previous silent production in 1920 that doesn’t seem to have survived, so ’39 really is the original and it did make quite an impression.
Of course, it’s not as accurate to the story, setting, or characters of the novel as my favorite adaption (from 1992). Since this flick ends after just 16 of the book’s 35 chapters, generations of viewers (if not readers) are left with the idea that Wuthering Heights is a tragic love story about a guy pining after his dead lover. Sure, that’s in there somewhere, but Brontë wrote more about nature vs. nurture, social class conflict, generational trauma, race, revenge, and property rights than romantic love. The characters are archetypes moving through an intricately plotted story told by several narrator’s eyes in different timelines, using unequaled poetry. It’s not easy to film everything in the book, but I still don’t approve of chopping out the second generation and more.
This movie is a relatively simple love triangle between Heathcliff, Cathy, and Edgar, plus a little girl-fighting between Cathy and Isabelle. Though it’s a weak triangle because Cathy doesn’t have much feeling for Edgar — she marries him for status, for his house, for pretty dresses and a comfortable life, fully admitting that she’s emotionally more connected to Heathcliff. This movie does use the iconic “I am Heathcliff” speech, where Cathy declares she and he are soulmates, so that emphasizes the whole supposed love story. Then there’s the ending where a ghostly Cathy and Heathcliff reunite on the moors — added at the request of producer Samuel Goldwyn in spite of director William Wyler’s wishes and using doubles for the actors because they’d already left the production. Adds one last romantic spin to the whole thing that Brontë never intended!
I’ll give it to Laurence Olivier though, he takes the thinned-down plot and manages to play Heathcliff as both a sympathetic ragamuffin and a revengeful rouge pretty well. He nails the Byronic hero and casts the mould that everyone else will try to be. Comparatively, Merle Oberon is out of her depth and/or the script doesn’t give her Cathy much depth, so she comes off as a wishy-washy jerk to everyone in her life, which is way too reductive of the novel. All the characters are supposed to be horrible people, but they also have complications that drive them to be horrible. So when a film strips out so much of their backstories and internal machinations, it becomes difficult or impossible to follow what they’re doing.
Then there’s the timeline. The book states the opening year as 1801 with Mr. Lockwood renting out Thrushcross Grange and meeting his landlord Heathcliff. Then Lockwood hears the history from his housekeeper, Nelly, who tells of Heathcliff and Catherine’s childhood through her marriage and death. Go check out my previous post where there’s a handy chart showing when all the characters are born, married, and died if you want to nerd out on actual historical detail, like I do.
This movie, however, has title credits saying the story is set “100 years ago,” thus around 1839, and then Nelly tells Lockwood the flashback tale, saying it happened “40 years ago,” so about 1799 when Heathcliff arrives at Wuthering Heights as a boy. That’d put Cathy’s marriage at 1817 and Heathcliff’s return just a year or two later. Not by the looks of it judging by these mid-Victorian costumes!
Wikipedia and IMDB claim that Samuel Goldwyn specifically wanted to use Civil War period costumes because he though the styles were more attractive than earlier fashions. Some sources even speculated that the filmmakers were trying to recycle costumes from a Civil War drama, but that seems unlikely for the principal characters’ costumes. I looked for decent films with costumes of this style in the 1930s, but more came out at the same time or later (Jezebel, 1938; Gone With the Wind, 1939) than this version of Wuthering Heights. Sure, these similar movies could recycle costumes for the extras, but the costume designer Omar Kiam, who would become known for his couture fashion designs later, likely created new outfits for Cathy and Isabella here.
I’d previously written off this movie’s costumes as inaccurate for the 1850s, but on second look, the women’s gowns are closer to mid-1840s fashions. The menswear is pretty generic, but the flick does have some quite lovely gowns, and that’s saying something when 1840s are usually the Death of Fashion!
But first, some outliers. Starting the movie in these costumes really sets a low bar because most anything would look good after these sad attempts. The childhood versions of Heathcliff and Cathy aren’t terrible but they don’t foreshadow anything particularly historically accurate either.
Young Heathcliff at least gets knee-length breeches, though the rest of his outfit looks like it was picked up from a 1930s equivalent of a thrift store. Young Cathy is wearing the most generic blouse and skirt possible. It has to get worse before it can get better. Adult Heathcliff wears a slightly ye-olde-timey full shirt and torn pants, sometimes with a generic vest.
But Cathy is just wearing modern (for the 1930s) sweaters and full skirts with a modern (for the 1930s) hairstyle. Compare her various sweaters with these styles:
And compare her hair to these:
Yup. It’s not until she returns from Thrushcross Grange and has met Edgar Linton that she finally wears “period” costumes.
She arrives in this coat-like gown with wide black lapels.
That vertical line was really coming into fashion in the 1840s, as shown in this fashion plate:
But her hat is this big Hollywood-ized thing — I think Scarlett O’Hara wears something similar in Gone With the Wind, but I don’t see it as a common 1840s or 1850s style. Still, it’s one of the rare hats she wears in the movie, so “E” for effort. This is also the first time Cathy has historically styled hair, with the sausage curls framing the sides of her face that was a fashionable look.
For the critical scene with Nelly when Cathy says it would degrade her to marry Heathcliff, which Heathcliff overhears, and then Cathy goes on to the “whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same, … I am Heathcliff” part that he doesn’t hear, she’s wearing this pale gown. It’s a ballgown that she wears to have dinner with Linton at Thrushcross Grange. Heathcliff sees her beforehand and overhears her when she returns.
Satin might not be her friend. There’s clearly no corsets worn in this film, just very closely fitted bodices, and I think those stress wrinkles would smooth out a bit if the gown had been constructed over an hourglass corset. But the fabrics used are lovely, check out the subtle horizontal stripe under the diamond pleated trim — it gives a nice feel for the period.
Cathy does soon enough marry Edgar Linton (played reluctantly by David Niven), and she gets a luminous duchess satin wedding gown for the event. This satin is better used, and it really glows on the screen, even filmed in black and white! Between this and the later ballroom scene, I don’t think budget was a serious concern for this movie’s costumes.
Good-looking lace on her gown too.
Yeah the sleeves are too short, but mostly for the outdoors in the English midlands, because long sleeves weren’t absolutely required for the period.
When Heathcliff returns, he finds Mr. and Mrs. Linton ensconced in their boringly happy life with Edgar’s younger sister Isabella (Geraldine Fitzgerald), and Nelly (Flora Robson) as their maid.
Promo image of the same ivy-covered dress — so domestic, so demure.
The trim is reminiscent of this ballgown on the right — because Cathy was just sitting around in her parlor, doing needlework, wearing a ballgown, now that she’s the greatest woman of the neighborhood like she wanted to be.
In this parlor scene, Isabella’s dress isn’t as dramatic as Cathy’s and her dress straddles the 1840s/50s line a bit more.
She gets one whiff of Heathcliff and is in LUUURRVE, so Isabella heads to Wuthering Heights to invite him on a hot date at her house the next day.
Isabella’s riding habit is trimmed in a faintly military style which was popular off and on, coming back strong in the 1850s, as this fashion plate shows (also note the vertical trim lines on the blue dress, reminiscent of the vertical ribbon trim on Isabella’s at-home dress).
The ball at Thrushcross Grange is costumed quite nicely. Other than the aforementioned lack of corsets, there’s no glaring anachronisms. Here’s Heathcliff in white tie, standing awkwardly behind some random guests and Isabella, center, in pale satin with flower corsages at the center of her neckline (at the pleated bertha collar, similar to the fashion plate above, with Cathy’s ivy-trim gown) and along the skirt of her gown.
Everybody dance!
Cathy’s ballgown is the most beautiful, of course. She’s a shimmering star, and again the fabrics of her gown and jewels glimmer and glow through the black and white film.
I’m sure someone wants to say the gown’s too low on her shoulders, but that was the fashion for 1840s ballgowns — as long as there’s no armpit cleavage! The shoulder-skimming style did rise higher in the 1850s.
After the ball, Cathy goes to Wuthering Heights and begs Heathcliff not to marry Isabella. He tells her it’s for revenge. She’s wearing a cute fur-trimmed frock for this short scene.
Costume-wise, that’s it, and plot-wise, that’s pretty much it too. Isabella regrets marrying Heathcliff immediately, then Cathy falls ill. Heathcliff runs to her deathbed for their final scene, and that’s the end of Nelly’s story.
I’d previously rated this Wuthering Heights as “1 out of 5 ghostly Cathys haunting you,” but upon reflection, I might bump it up to a 2 out of 5 based on these costumes. They aren’t at all accurate to the novel, but they’re surprisingly accurate in themselves, and Olivier gives a good Heathcliff.
How do you rate this Wuthering Heights?
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