Emily Brontë’s ghostly romance novel is prime fodder for the cinema. After all, how can you not fall for a love story so powerful it transcends the bonds of death? The very idea that emotions like love can exist beyond the grave and that one day two lovers will be reunited again on the very moors where those emotions first germinated is one that we would all like to believe. It’s a beautiful concept that Emily put to good use in her delightfully eerie prose written nearly 200 years ago.
William Wyler’s 1939 adaptation of the Brontë novel is not the first time this book has been adapted for the screen. That honor goes to a 1920 British production directed by A. V. Bramble, a silent film director who got his start as an actor on stage. Bramble’s version of Wuthering Heights is considered a lost film, so alas, there is no known surviving print we can watch to compare to Wyler’s. There have, however, been numerous adaptations since, with the most recent slated for a February 2026 release and starring Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi in the leads.
The novel is significantly more complex than Wyler’s film, which has elected to remove the second generation of characters in favor of a sharper focus on Heathcliff (Laurence Olivier) and Cathy (Merle Oberon). This necessitated the combining of characters to make the narrative work for the film. What remains, while pared down to the bare bones, still has the emotional heft that the novel had without the burden of too many characters and side stories. This trimming down does have some negative effects, too, though which I will get into in a moment.
The story begins with a young boy, Heathcliff, who is found on the streets of Liverpool by Mr. Earnshaw (Cecil Humphreys) and brought home to be raised alongside his children, Cathy and Hindley. While Cathy eventually warms up to Heathcliff, Hindley deeply resents the boy, a feeling that grows stronger as they all get older. After Earnshaw passes away, Hindley forces Heathcliff into being the stable boy out of his sheer hatred. Meanwhile, Heathcliff and Cathy have fallen in love and sneak off often to the moors to be alone.
But fate gets in the way of things as the two lovers overhear a party at the neighboring Linton estate and when they investigate the sounds they are attacked by the Linton’s dogs. Cathy is injured and invited to stay with the Linton’s while she recovers. During this time she meets Edgar (David Niven) who falls in love with and desires to marry her. When she returns home she is reminded of Heathcliff and, flippantly remarks that to marry him would be to degrade herself. He overhears this and flees, only for her to chase after him into a storm. When she is brought back home she is ill from the exposure. Edgar brings her a doctor and, when she recovers, they marry. Some time later Heathcliff returns, having made his fortune and become a gentleman. But he finds Cathy married, though she still loves him and only him.
This story is bookended, as the book itself was, with a bit of a mystery. In it, a traveler named Lockwood (Miles Mander) arrives at the estate of Wuthering Heights seeking shelter from a snowstorm. Heathcliff is there and, despite his cold demeanor, allows Lockwood to stay. But Lockwood is awakened in the night by a cold shudder and, upon investigating, hears a noise calling out from the moors. “Heathcliff, let me in! I’m lost in the moors. It’s Cathy!” This opening is a wonderful setup designed to get you interested in what could have led to this spectral figure wandering the moors in the middle of a harsh winter storm.
Whether you are familiar with the novel or not, this opening works either way. It builds a level of suspension and mystery without being overdone. It is needed for this film because once the story behind the ghostly Cathy is being told, it will take a while before things pick up again. We will spend a great deal of time getting to know the principal characters, especially Heathcliff and Cathy. Some adaptations of this novel have speculated that Cathy and Heathcliff might in fact be half siblings, but that interpretation of the original prose has been an unpopular one. Instead, this version keeps things simple and just tells us that he was found living on the streets, and Earnshaw took him in. Later, after Heathcliff returns, having made his fortune, he says something about having discovered his real heritage and taken his inheritance, but this feels more like deflection away from how he really secured his wealth.
Hindley is entirely two-dimensional as a character. This is a problem throughout the film, and it starts from the moment we see him. He is the stereotypical bully who is unhappy that his father has brought another person into the house. But this attitude doesn’t seem to stem from being overly coddled as a child. When Heathcliff is brought into the house, Earnshaw makes the two boys share a room despite Hindley’s loud protests. We also never see Earnshaw overly indulging the boy. Hindley is just presented as being a bad person, and no amount of humbling will change that as we see later on.
Cathy, on the other hand, is the exact opposite, which makes her sometimes a target of Hindley’s bullying, too. She is more of a free spirit, which is why Heathcliff is drawn to her, and the two play together often out on the moors. This friendship, and later love, is perhaps the real reason Heathcliff stays on at Wuthering Heights after Earnshaw dies and Hindley becomes even more tyrannical. This seems to be backed up by his response when he overhears her saying she could never marry him.
Cathy’s marriage to Edgar feels like an abrupt decision made when she felt Heathcliff was gone forever. She never loved Edgar, and he is left in the awkward position of being married to a woman who loves someone else through no fault of his own. David Niven conveys this well with a character that is woefully underdeveloped in the film. This is an area that a little more screentime could have remedied. He’s charming and loves his wife, but there is little else to his character, and were it not for David Niven, this character would have been completely forgettable. The one moment of real character we get from him is his dismissal of Heathcliff even after he has returned a wealthy man. Edgar still sees him as a lesser person.
When Heathcliff returns and finds Cathy married, rather than try and interfere with her marriage, he begins courting Edgar’s naïve sister, Isabella (Geraldine Fitzgerald). This relationship comes across much like that of Cathy and Edgar’s, with Isabella deeply in love but Heathcliff just going through the emotions. Their marriage is Cathy’s undoing, and she soon falls deathly ill. This part of the story seems to exist just to provide a convenient reason for Cathy’s death. Dying of a broken heart has never worked for me on a narrative level, and it’s no different here. It undermines the drama. Earlier in the film, she falls ill after being out in the rainy weather looking for Heathcliff. A similar method could have been used in the final act to affect her death. Instead, she died from a broken heart, which just feels like a trope. Fortunately, much like the doomed couple in A Farewell to Arms, Heathcliff carries her to the window so that she can look out upon the moors that meant so much to them, and she dies with that view in her eyes.
The end of the film, the second half of the bookend, is meant to be a happy ending with Heathcliff going out into the snow to find the ghost of Cathy and ends up joining her in the afterlife. It’s a beautiful sentiment punctuated with the visuals of the two hand-in-hand upon the moors, forever in each other’s company. We are meant to forget all about Isabella and Edgar because they don’t factor into this couple’s love. Perhaps that is why so little time was dedicated to developing them as characters.
Wuthering Heights is a classic romance story with a ghostly twist in the narrative. On so many levels, this plot works, but by distilling the plot down and eliminating so many of the secondary characters, it does lose something. We lose motivations, whole subplots, and even characters that just disappear when it is convenient. This is far from a disappointing adaptation, but, like so many classic novels adapted for the screen, it loses something in the translation.
Academy Award Nominations:
Outstanding Production: Samuel Goldwyn
Best Director: William Wyler
Best Actor: Laurence Olivier
Best Supporting Actress: Geraldine Fitzgerald
Best Screenplay: Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur
Best Art Direction: James Basevi
Best Cinematography - Black-and-White: Gregg Toland (won)
Best Original Score: Alfred Newman
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Release Date: April 13, 1939
Running Time: 103 minutes
Not Rated
Starring: Merle Oberon, Laurence Olivier, David Niven, Flora Robson, Donald Crisp, Geraldine Fitzgerald, and Hugh Williams
Directed By: William Wyler
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