Wuthering Heights

I turned this on thinking we were going to get the 1992 film version with Ralph Fiennes and Juliet Binoche; instead it was a new low key TV version made for LWT and PBS with a British cast and production crew. `Wuthering Heights' has been filmed at least 10 times in English alone, there is not so much a definite version as one for successive eras, and the various versions each tell us something about the periods in which they were made. This version is not exactly post-modern, but it lacks romantic glamour. It's still a tale of wild, hopeless love but we get more of the pain than of the rapture. We also get the full story, not the truncated tale of the 1939 Hollywood version (a fine movie of its period). Here, Heathcliff and Cathy, doomed lovers, are redeemed by the happiness of their children.

The mostly unknown cast are fine and the locations fitting, though I don't think `Wuthering Heights' itself was meant to be quite so pokey; the Earnshaws were meant to be minor gentry, not peasants. Ghosts are always difficult to film convincingly but these ones are well captured. I'd like to think people will still read the book but the reality is most will just see a film version. It's a powerful story and this is a reasonable `no frills' rendering.