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The opening showcases the sort of astringent mimesis admired by Welles, it echoes through Citizen Kane and The Magnificent Ambersons. Fall of the manor, the ghost in the window, a tale recounted in the middle of a blizzard. The gypsy orphan is "a dour-looking individual" since childhood, Heathcliff is given sexy torment by Laurence Olivier at his crossroads of matinee idol and master thespian. Merle Oberon's Cathy, on the other hand, is so glassy that, when she realizes the couple's shared soul, the point has to be underlined with a dolly-in and screen-blanching lightning. (Her most spirited flashes come at death's door, the last embrace of mutual destruction.) Dream realms, the children's castle of Penistone Crag, the luxurious ball at Thrushcross Grange. "Run away. Bring back the world." Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur supply the tidy streamlining of Brontë, William Wyler anticipates Lean's Dickens adaptations with an album of Gothic engravings. The stable boy stares at his hands and smashes them through a pane, on her wedding day his beloved feels "a cold wind across my heart." The burden of passion in a straitlaced order, even Edgar the high-toned suitor (David Niven) notices "some of that beggar's dirt is on you." Weary of "fops and pale poets," Isabella (Geraldine Fitzgerald) eagerly takes up with the brooder and withers away, light briefly returns to her eyes upon news of her rival's terminal condition. Wyler avails himself of Ruysdael views for the recreation of Yorkshire Moors in the California desert, Gregg Toland wraps it all in soupy mist and candlelight shadow. "She calls him, and he follows her out onto the moor." Amour fou is something best left to Buñuel, the coda here settles for warmed-over Borzage. With Flora Robson, Donald Crisp, Leo G. Carroll, Hugh Williams, Miles Mander, Cecil Kellaway, and Cecil Humphreys. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |