Wuthering Heights (1978) and the difficulty of adapting Emily Bronte’s novel

Anyone who loves Wuthering Heights has long recognised the difficulty, if not the impossibility, of adapting it (properly) for the screen. There is something about it that resists adaptation. My friend Himadri says “There seems something so wild & elemental in the novel. And as soon as you flesh it out with actors and with real locations, it all comes down to earth with a bump. There’s a sense of terror running through the novel that no adaptation seems able to capture.” 

Since the Laurence Olivier – Merle Oberon film in 1939, filmmakers have had a long tradition of reducing the savagery and brutality, cutting away the second half, and turning Wuthering Heights into a romance. Over and over again, I have come across people who come to Wuthering Heights expecting a passionate love story, clearly because of pop culture and all these film adaptations, and getting shocked by the emotional violence and the detestable characters in the book. So I came to the 1978 TV series with great expectations, having read that it’s the most faithful to the novel, and noticed that it’s made by the BBC one year after they gave us the best adaptation of Anna Karenina (Caroline Langrishe, who plays Kitty in Anna Karenina, here plays Isabella).

As it turns out, the 1978 has the opposite problem: the cruelty is there, the violence is there, the hate is there—but where is the love, the passion? I don’t see the chemistry, the passion between Catherine and Heathcliff. The problem is not Kay Adshead, who I think is the best Catherine I’ve seen—she depicts the selfishness, the wayward personality and fiery temper of Catherine, but she also has charm—you can see why Heathcliff is obsessed with her and you can see why Edgar Linton is drawn to her wild, intense personality. But Ken Hutchison is not quite Heathcliff. He rants, he screams, but I don’t quite see the passion from inside. I don’t see any chemistry between him and Catherine. I don’t see what Catherine and Isabella see in him. Wuthering Heights may be a story of abuse and hate, but the love story between Heathcliff and Catherine is important—even if it’s a tortured, obsessive, and destructive kind of love that destroys everything in its path, there is love—we need to see that love, that passion between Heathcliff and Catherine, and I think the series doesn’t show that. And it’s not just Catherine. To put it perhaps a bit crudely, Heathcliff should be hot—he is savage, vengeful, a monster even, but he should be hot—Catherine may think “Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same”, but Isabella doesn’t have that and we must understand why she is attracted to him, against reason, against Catherine’s warning, against Edgar’s protest. 

But this is why it’s so hard, if not impossible, to adapt Wuthering Heights: filmmakers usually reduce the ruthlessness and viciousness so that Heathcliff can be a romantic figure; the 1978 series swings too far the other way.

As for the rest of the cast, I like Maria Swailes as the young Catherine Earnshaw, David Robb as Edgar, and Caroline Langrishe as Isabella; Pat Heywood is a different interpretation of Nelly Dean, playing her as a good, reliable housekeeper (not quite my interpretation), but she is very good; the only one I really don’t like, apart from Ken Hutchison as Heathcliff, is Richard Kay as Mr Lockwood, who has a melodramatic way of acting that takes me out of the story. 

Is this worth watching? I think it is. You might disagree with my views on Ken Hutchison’s performance, and this is an adaptation that takes seriously the dark and brutal side of the characters.