This earthy story of Yorkshire's bleak moors, studded with malice and foreboding, dates back to a picturesque era in English literature. It was written by Emily Brontë, one of the three brilliant daughters of an Irish Anglican clergyman, in 1847. These Brontës were motherless; wild and self-taught, neglected by their father, they grew up amid the loneliness of the Yorkshire moors.

Wuthering Heights is a strangely flavored tale — in the emotional romantic mood — of a widower's two children and a little gypsy boy taken into the family. The girl, Cathy, comes to love the "gypsy scum," the son grows to head the household, a drunken waster. The desolate house is a place of hatred, tyranny, and cruelty, but Cathy and her gypsy love find some measure of happiness by creeping away to a dream castle on a crag overlooking the moors. If you know your Wuthering Heights, you know how Cathy comes to marry another, how the gypsy lives for a lonely revenge.

Just how much appeal this novel of another day has for American audiences remains to be seen. Director William Wyler has tried to be faithful to this bitter assortment of characters created by the minister's daughter of Victorian days. You will like Merle Oberon as Cathy, Laurence Olivier has never done anything better than the gypsy — but it is the newcomer, Geraldine Fitzgerald, who steals the film as the tragic girl Heathcliff marries to hurt his Cathy.

Dated, dour — and darned dramatic.

VITAL STATISTICS: The Goldwyn staff crested its Yorkshire amid the Conejos Hills Norwegian settlement, fifty miles out of Hollywood in Ventura County, where 540 acres were rented, a stone farmhouse was built, temporary work and cook houses were thrown up, plaster-stone fences constructed, an inclined railway built to the crag where a plaster. Wuthering Heights was molded.... Director Wyler wanted an expanse of heather-covered moors. So they blasted away the native flora. Boys were paid a penny a bunch for loose tumbleweed. This, sprinkled with purple sawdust, was anchored on the turf. In front, close to the cameras, were 1.000 studie-raised heather plants (real). It took six month to grow ‘em.... Art Director James Baseyi, who created the big blow for Hurricane, did the snowstorm. A mere flurry for the miracle man.... Watch for the bath scene, when Merle Oberon does a De Mille in a tin tub of the 14 fts. Her knees cramped up to her chin. Merle says it was darned uncomfortable.... Goldwyn tested twenty-two actors, including Orson Welles, the man from Mars, for the role of Hindley, and then hired Sussex-born Hugh Williams.

Publication Date: May 13, 1939