Wuthering Heights (1961)

D. Don Siegel
B&W


This is called learning from your mistakes. This is called poring over the smouldering wreckage of what went before, having the humility to admit that that particular journey was started with the brake wires cut and a rubber toy in place of the steering wheel, and then correcting those massive errors going forward. This is called not crashing the same car into the same wall all over again; or more appropriately this is called not just churning out any old crap for a cheap buck. This is the way things should have been.


Yes, Elvis in ‘Wuthering Heights’ is fantastic!


As an Elvis obsessed little boy who became an Elvis obsessed man, I take great pleasure in bringing these neglected gems of his much maligned film-work forward. And it gives me particular joy to polish up, buff until its gloriously shiny and then present this gem – with a wide soup-bowl shaped grin on my face – for your perusal. The last time Elvis tackled a classic, you might remember, it was ‘Hamlet’ and the results can be politely described as not good. There was Elvis in a doublet and hose, trying to master iambic pentameter with that Memphis drawl and singing whole soliloquies whilst ridiculous ghostly bongo players kept rhythm over his shoulder.


There is nothing so ludicrous on display here, this one is playing to Elvis’s strengths. I have no idea whether there was ever a plan to set this in Victorian Yorkshire, with Elvis giving us his best “Ecky thump, it be right perishing out moor”; but if there was, then it was thankfully scrapped. (Seeing Elvis trying to speak like Sean Bean is no more appetising than imagining Sean Bean quiffed up and trying to play Elvis.) Instead the action of this film is set in Wuthering Heights, a suburb of Nashville.


It’s a brilliant conceit. Here we have the cute as several dozen buttons Tuesday Weld as Cathy (the same year in which she met Elvis in the far less inspiring, and indeed wild, ‘Wild in The Country’), an aspiring and truly headstrong country and western singer who has got herself engaged to a Pat Boone-esque crooner, Edward Litton (played with appropriate lack of charisma by someone called Dave Fellows – quite, me neither), but who’s that smouldering his way back into town? Why it’s Elvis as Heathcliff , the boy she grew up with and the great romance of her life.


Even for a modern day version of the story, it’s one which deserves the description ‘inspired by’ rather than ‘adapted from’ Emily Bronte’s novel. Indeed it can be more accurately described as a musical remake of the Laurence Olivier/Merle Oberon version – as both films leave out the second and more interesting part of the book. But in the end fidelity doesn’t matter, as this is brilliant. Siegel (helming Elvis for the second rime) shoots for and gets a beautiful, noir soaked black & white; Elvis’s role requires little more than to just show up and be broody and soulful, and he does more of that with one look than most actors can manage in a career; and Weld is suitably intense and passionate, as well as utterly convincing as a lifelong object of desire. While if Fellows is as uninteresting as a sheep farmer in 1800’s Yorkshire, well he’s supposed to be.


Okay, if the film was perfect the songs would be a lot better – such numbers as ‘The Boy Heathcliff (Back in Town)’, ‘Don’t Run Away, Cathy’ and ‘It Ain’t the Wind That’s Wuthering;’ are never going to show up  on any Elvis ‘best of’, no matter how many volumes it stretches to. But then this is the rare thing, a musical where the music isn’t that important. No, ‘Wuthering Heights’ isn’t about the songs, it’s about sheer sex appeal, it’s about pouting and rebellious youth, it’s about giving up everything for passion, it’s about personifying cool – and in that regard it succeeds on every measure.