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"Every five years, he awakens and dreams while awake," writes Rivette of Henry Hathaway, here is his most captivating early reverie. The doll with the cracked visage and the dying mother in the Bath chair, traumas to forge the bond between Victorian tykes (Dickie Moore, Virginia Weidler) in the French garden, a grave prologue emulated in Bresson's Au Hasard Balthazar. "The desperate love between children—is there anything in the world forgotten so soon?" As an adult, the lad (Gary Cooper) excels as a London architect while feeling the romantic void. The Cockney flirt (Ida Lupino) is a temporary distraction, more lasting is the advice from the blind boss (Donald Meek) who sees the ocean within. Yorkshire stables call for a gentlemanly builder, and who receives him but the playmate from youth as the Duchess (Ann Harding)? "We're not mystics," she says of their serendipitous reunion, the killing of her jealous husband (John Halliday) splits the couple, "we'll find a way." Borzage terrain, rendered even more mysterious by Hathaway's straightforward handling of the physical in the face of the abstract, like Walsh directing L'Année dernière à Marienbad. The sublime lost and found, the private cosmos conjured up by the broken-backed dreamer in his dungeon cell. "Everything inside leads to her." A shared oneiric escape, the iron bars the lovers pass through to find their idyll at the top of the world, the enchanted castle crumbled by a thunderbolt. (Charles Lang deserves virtual co-auteur credit for the controlled delirium of his lighting.) Decaying flesh versus eternal spirit, one final rendezvous out of the darkness. "The strangest things are true and the truest things are strange." Buñuel's famous admiration is everywhere visible in his Wuthering Heights. With Douglass Dumbrille, Doris Lloyd, and Gilbert Emery. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |