Photo-Illustration: Vulture; Photos: Oscilloscope, Orson Video, Warner Bros., United Artists, Image Entertainment, BBC, PBS, Eros Worldwide, Everett Collection

Is there another novel that crosses borders and eras as smoothly as Wuthering Heights does? The recent release of Emerald Fennell’s version of Emily Brontë’s 1847 classic has prompted a new wave of debates over literary fidelity, but the truth is that Wuthering Heights works no matter the context or the culture. It is the ultimate melodrama, and despite its English origins the enthusiasm with which it has been adapted into other nations’ cinemas is proof of the visceral power of its story and themes. When the new film was first announced, I had the idea of trying to track down all its many film and TV versions — loose, faithful, or otherwise. This… turned out to be a bigger project than initially envisioned. The story has been adapted all over the world, sometimes in modern settings, often in its original setting, and occasionally in a different period entirely. (Medieval Japan? 1930s France? I’m still waiting for the sci-fi version.) I did have to limit my search to feature-length films and mini-series, because I’m not sure how I’d even track down (let alone have time to watch) a 48-episode Venezuelan telenovela from 1976 or the various Mexican telenovelas over the years, the first of which aired in 1964. Then there are the adaptations that have been lost to time. A 1920 silent feature film no longer exists. At least two early BBC versions were never preserved. But for now, here are all the film and TV adaptations of Wuthering Heights that I could get my hands on. Ranked.

Photo: The Global Asylum Production Company/Lifetime Television/Everett Collection

Five years after Titanic 2 and two years after Sharknado, notorious “mockbuster” film company the Asylum released this teen version of Wuthering Heights, and it’s arguably worse than either of those previous sleazy-fun cash grabs. But it does have a clever set-up: Skate-punk rebel Heath (Andrew Jacobs) is the son of a Mexican-immigrant mom who’s been detained by the Feds and has disappeared into the immigration system. Mr. Earnshaw (James Caan!), the owner of the factory where she worked, feels guilty and brings Heath to live with his family, where the young man and Catherine (Paloma Kwiatkowski) rekindle an old childhood friendship. Of course, Catherine is a loner herself now, having been slut-shamed by the mean girls at school for hooking up with one of their boyfriends. Look, it could have worked — the elements are there, and Wuthering Heights has been successfully updated before. But the dead-eyed performances and the maudlin writing are a fatal combination here, and with such queasy topics as deportation and teen suicide in the mix, the film can’t even hide behind the notion of parody, though at times it certainly plays like one.

In what appears to be a vanity endeavor, Bryan Ferriter wrote, produced, directed, and stars in this 2022 version of the novel that brings nothing new to the material save for a heavy dose of camp. The wildly amateurish performances turn the story’s tragic high points into moments of unintentional goofiness. The florid camerawork (shot in Montana, of all places) just makes things worse. Did this even get a proper release? About the nicest thing one can say about it is that it’s got quite a bit of ambition for what appears to be a DIY production: One must have at least some respect for someone whose microbudget passion project is a full, period-dress adaptation of Wuthering freaking Heights. Go big or go home, as they say.

The lesser of the Filipino adaptations of Wuthering Heights, this is a mostly lifeless updating that drains the tale of much of its complexity. In this one, Andrea (Angel Locsin) never really stops loving Daniel (Richard Gutierrez), the Heathcliff character, but she’s surprisingly straightforward about wanting a better life for herself. Admirably, the film doesn’t judge her for this. “Is it a crime to dream?” she asks Daniel early on when he chastises her for desiring to live like the De Veras, the wealthy family for whom their parents work. Daniel, driven away by the grotesquely abusive Jason (Ryan Eigenmann, playing the Hindley character) and by seeing the wealthy Anton De Vera (T.J. Trinidad) publicly declare his love for Andrea, becomes an underground bare-knuckle fighter and then a gangster. When he returns, he’s cold and vengeful, but Andrea continues to carry a torch for him. The mawkish qualities of the story are out in full force — the whole thing is narrated by a now-aged Daniel, who relates this tragic tale to a gaggle of his grandkids — but Mike Tuviera’s flat direction fails to make use of what could have been a great visual and emotional canvas.

Charlton. Heston. As. Heathcliff. How could a man so committed to the jutting-chin school of acting, who emphasized nearly every other word, get through so much dialogue so quickly? Maybe because he always made sure to speak the back half of his dialogue with one anguished breath. “Catherine Earnshaw! May you not rest as long as I am living! Haunt me! Let your ghost be with me, always, let it drive memadonlydon’tleavemealoneinthisabysswhereIcannotfindyou.” In truth, it’s great fun to watch Heston as Heathcliff in this one-hour TV drama, produced for CBS’s Studio One series, from the Golden Age of television. This is an unabashedly romantic interpretation of the novel that does away with most of the latter parts of the story and really focuses on Heathcliff as a tragic lover, turning his victims into villains: In this one, when Hindley Earnshaw and Isabella Linton (who literally ages like 20 years immediately after marrying Heathcliff!) plot to kill him, we don’t sense years of torment boiling over; no, they mostly just seem like dicks. Meanwhile, the score appears to be an LP of Ralph Vaughan Williams’s “Fantasia on Greensleeves” set on repeat. Not the worst adaptation, but its attempts to condense so much of the plot into a short running time requires cutting a lot of critical corners; this was clearly made for an audience that already basically knew the story, so it breezes through a lot of emotional detail.

Many a thesis could be written about the pull Wuthering Heights has had on a certain strain of pop star. There is Kate Bush’s immortal “Wuthering Heights,” of course, but also save a thought for Jim Steinman, the legendary songwriter (and key Meat Loaf collaborator) whose obsession with the novel led him to compose the music for MTV’s 2003 Wuthering Heights (see further up the list) as well as the song “It’s All Coming Back to Me Now,” recorded by Pandora’s Box and Céline Dion (and the subject of a court case between Steinman and Meat Loaf, who badly wanted the song for Bat Out of Hell II: Back Into Hell). But perhaps no rock god ever went full Heathcliff the way Cliff Richard did for this 1996 musical, a stage production (with songs by John Farrar and Tim Rice) that re-creates scenes from the novel while Richard, as Heathcliff, strides through like a lordly narrator-protagonist. Critically blasted but massively popular with audiences, this dream project is the height of kitsch, somehow made palatable by Richard’s characteristic earnestness. (The musical was recorded and released on video, with some stylistic embellishments; that’s why it’s on this list.) The story hews pretty closely to the novel, but it also expands upon Heathcliff’s time away, showing us his travels around the world, which also allows the musical arrangements to take on different influences, as he builds his fortune. It is here that we see the shift in his character, too. First he’s captured by an indeterminate African tribe; when they ask for the buttons on his coat, he asks for the gold worn on their headdresses. Then he goes to India and robs a king. Then to China, where he robs ordinary people. It’s all very schlocky and silly and dated, but the songs are … kind of great? “Misunderstood Man,” the key single from this effort, is one of the singer’s highpoints. (“So judge if you can / The devil incarnate / Or a misunderstood man?” Guess which side of that debate Sir Cliff falls on.)

Over the decades, Wuthering Heights has inspired any number of telenovelas, and this slick, fevered 2019 Venezuelan miniseries is a good example of how Emily Brontë’s tale maps onto the rhythms of a soap opera. This one opens with Alejandro (played by the impossibly hunky Orlando Delgado) digging up Catalina’s (Michelle De Andrade) grave, removing her incredibly well-preserved corpse, and carrying her with him on his motorcycle to their special hiding spot, where he plays his guitar for her. Pretty macabre! After the cops grab him and throw him in jail, a police inspector (Miguel de León) starts an investigation into just who this man is and why he did what he did. Meanwhile, any number of people — including Catalina’s brother Ignacio (Juvel Vielma); her husband, Felipe Salgado (Leandro Arvelo); and the patriarch of the wealthy Salgado clan, Federico (Jorge Palacios) — do all they can to make sure Alejandro stays behind bars. The ensuing drama is like a turbo-loaded version of Brontë’s story, set amid a picture-postcard land of beaches, sand dunes, and salt flats and full of families scheming against one another. Quite appropriately, we get as much court intrigue about the Salgados as we do about the love between Catalina and Alejandro. That love, of course, is a pure and noble one in this iteration. Don’t look for any signs of the older Heathcliff’s brutality here. On her deathbed, it’s Catalina who apologizes for the way she’s treated Alejandro, and there isn’t a hint of irony to her words. Still, this is a well-produced, breezy bit of fluff, and the attractive cast makes it an easy watch.

This lavish Italian miniseries may well have been an attempt to replicate the successful 1956 miniseries from RAI TV. (See higher up the list.) With swooping cameras and elaborate location work, it’s impressively mounted, though its main contribution might well be its interpretation of why Mr. Earnshaw might have brought Heathcliff (Alessio Boni as an adult) to Wuthering Heights. In the show’s early scenes, we see them in Liverpool, where Earnshaw saves the young orphan from being sold into slavery. One night, Heathcliff in turn saves Earnshaw’s life, which thus indebts the man to him. But while this version does fill in little details here and there, including Hindley’s role in Mr. Earnshaw’s death, it drops the ball where it really matters. Most miniseries versions of Wuthering Heights try to take in the full breadth of Brontë’s story, showing Heathcliff’s later cruelty. Although it runs more than three hours long, this one excises the second half of the story entirely.

An enormous success at the Indian box office partly thanks to its delightful songs, this is an extremely loose adaptation of Wuthering Heights — even more so than some of the other variations from that country over the years. In this one, the beautiful Anjali (Shilpa Shetty) and the handsome but poor Dev (Suniel Shetty) find their passionate love undone by her family’s decision to arrange her marriage to a wealthy man, Ram (Akshay Kumar). But here comes an intriguing twist: Anjali eventually does fall in love with Ram. Indeed, Ram turns out to be a kind, decent fellow with his own troubles trying to save his business from the clutches of his step-family. When Dev returns as a wealthy man after several years, he vows to destroy Ram’s business and teams up with the man’s conniving step-siblings. Almost all the Indian adaptations of Wuthering Heights fall on the side of depicting the Heathcliff character as a wronged lover who is ultimately in the right; here’s one that leans more toward his villainy, resulting in something slightly less predictable, if still quite silly at times. Don’t miss the scene where Dev’s mother instantly dies of shock when he tells her Anjali has dumped him.

Two years after winning the Golden Bear at the Berlin Film Festival for Dry Summer, Turkish director Metin Erksan made this updated version of Wuthering Heights, which streamlines Brontë’s tale into a twisted melodrama of love curdling into hate. It skips over the childhood stuff and instead focuses on the growing rift between the two lovers, Ali (this version’s Heathcliff, played by matinee idol Kartal Tibet, who would later become one of the country’s foremost comedy directors) and Yıldız (the Catherine, played by Nilüfer Koçyiğit), as she’s charmed by the wealthy land-owning family nearby. Erksan was good with locations and makes fine use of the landscape here, which is appropriately dominated by the ruins of a fortress. Gone, however, are the thorny emotions of Brontë, replaced by something far more poisonous. Once Ali returns from his exile an absurdly wealthy man (and sporting a comically fake mustache), his brutality consumes everyone around him, and Yıldız’s hatred of him grows. We sense zero affection between them, simmering or otherwise. Ali belatedly sees the error of his ways, of course, and in the film’s bravura finale, he hypnotizes Yıldız out of her deathbed and coaxes her to walk in a half-daze with him to the beach where they used to declare their love for one another. There, she begs him to tell her he loves her. He replies that he hates her. She drops dead in his arms. He screams to the heavens. The end.

There have been a few attempts over the years to update Wuthering Heights into hip-to-the-moment, teen-friendly versions. This MTV production is hectic, overproduced, and deeply silly, with Erika Christensen’s Cate and Mike Vogel’s blond-mopped Heath torn apart by scheming rich kids Edward and Isabel Linton (Christopher Masterson and Katherine Heigl). Heath is an aspiring musician, and Isabel lets him use the music-production room at her school, which leads to his becoming a chart-topping superstar. (It’s the early days of digital music, of course, so we get to watch montages of his songs going viral on internet newsgroups. Sample comment: “This RULES … This is whack!”) The movie ends with Cate dying while giving birth in her and Heath’s love cave right after admitting to him that the baby is his and not Edward’s. Still, some fun supporting bits in this one: Heigl clearly enjoys playing the snarling, sadistic Isabel; Masterson is the very picture of effete snobbery; and it’s fun to see punk god John Doe as Mr. Earnshaw.

This BBC miniseries was billed as a gender-flipped variation on Emily Brontë’s novel, but it is so, so much more. Set in the modern Yorkshire Dales, it basically reimagines Wuthering Heights as an after-school special on crack. Working-class firebrand Carol Bolton (Sarah Smart) and bourgeois mama’s boy Andrew Lawton (Joseph McFadden) have their love thwarted by Andrew’s philandering doctor father (Nicholas Farrell), who just happens to reveal to his son that Carol’s younger sister, Lisa, is actually her daughter, the result of a pregnancy at the age of 12. (She’s also still Carol’s sister, however, since the pregnancy was the result of Carol being raped by her abusive, alcoholic father.) Andrew can’t take this revelation, particularly since he and Carol have been waiting to have sex; his rejection sets Carol off, so she wrecks his car, murders his dog, etc. The whole thing is shot in aggressively stylized fashion, which often threatens to undermine the serious subjects on display. (Andrew actually commits suicide at the end of this one after Carol and his father spend a long, stormy night looking for him.) And while it’s profoundly uneven — veering between sensitive drama and ridiculous soap-opera theatrics — it has conviction, particularly in Smart’s portrayal of Carol as a passionate, mentally troubled young woman whose characterization pulls no punches; this female Heathcliff is still a blend of lover and monster, just revamped for the millennium. (The actress also played Catherine’s daughter in a 1998 film of Wuthering Heights.)

You just know, right from the amazing opening car crash — which incorporates footage of multiple fruit carts getting totaled, stores being destroyed, walls being smashed, and what appears to be B-roll of a comically huge explosion — that this one is going to be special. (That car crash, in case you’re wondering, is what orphans the protagonist.) And the patchwork style of Brij Sadanah’s direction enhances the colorfully over-the-top story, which recasts Wuthering Heights as a sensationalistic revenge drama. Rajesh Khanna’s Raju is tortured to such an extreme by his sneering adopted brother, Thakur Vikram Singh (Pradeep Kumar), that by the time he comes back as a powerful prince and businessman, we’re similarly thirsty for blood. (In this version, Raju is presumed dead — killed by Thakur’s men — so when our hero comes back, he poses as someone else.) More troublesome is Raju’s relationship with Poonam (Salma Agha, playing the Catherine of this piece). She rejects him for not being wealthy enough, and so he makes sure she gets a taste of his vengeance, too, which in turn makes their ultimate reconciliation feel weirdly tacked on. For all its wild flaws, however, this film is never boring. It’s also an extremely close remake of a 1983 Pakistani film, Dehleez, which we’ll get into next.

Oonche Log and Dehleez are indeed remarkably similar — right down to their spectacular opening car crashes — though they both also owe a debt to the 1966 Hindi classic Dil Diya Dard Liya (see further up the list). The star of Dehleez is Nadeem, one of the greatest stars in Pakistani cinema, and he makes a fine onscreen pairing with Shabnam, another extremely popular star with whom he often appeared in romantic dramas. Once again, the Heathcliff character is less a complicated, corrupted soul and more a righteous, vengeful lover determined to bring down those who wronged him in all sorts of ways: Don’t look to either this film or its remake for anything resembling nuance. But Nadeem and Shabnam’s chemistry is undeniable, and the musical numbers are lively and impressive.

Massimo Girotti was one of Italy’s greatest stars — familiar to international audiences from Luchino Visconti’s Ossessione and Senso and Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Teorema, among many other classics — and he’s a natural match for Heathcliff. The actor was certainly dashing, but he also made for a great anti-hero, with a sinister edge always lurking beneath those good looks. Girotti is indeed the main reason to see this four-part Italian miniseries version of the novel, which is quite faithful to the book, though it often leaves a bit too much story to be covered in voiceover. Still, director Mario Landi, working with the limited resources of television production at the time, provides intriguing little visual touches, utilizing windows as a central motif to explore the book’s running theme of outsiders always looking in. Like most productions of the time, the series does downplay Heathcliff’s monstrousness a little, but it’s still quite moving. The finale, when he caresses the face of the young Cathy, his beloved’s daughter, while hallucinating that she’s the deceased Catherine herself (both are played by Anna Maria Ferrero), is hard to resist. This was the third original miniseries produced for Italy’s national broadcaster RAI, and it proved enormously popular at the time.

Broadcast in the U.S. on Masterpiece Theater, this is a perfectly solid and straight-forward feature-length adaptation of Wuthering Heights whose only real crime is that it’s not as memorable as the 1939, 1970, 1992, or 2011 films and nowhere near as thorough as the many miniseries versions. As Heathcliff, the Scottish actor Robert Cavanah is more brooding than dashing, but that hard edge works for the character’s grim undertones. The Irish actress Orla Brady makes a rather refined and headstrong Catherine. We don’t entirely buy them as a couple, but they are each compelling in their own right. Actually, beautiful young Matthew Macfadyen, playing Hareton Earnshaw, years before he burst out of the screen as Mr. Darcy in Pride and Prejudice, might be the most notable actor in this bunch.

On paper, the volatile, unpredictable, ethereally good-looking Tom Hardy would seem like a great choice for Heathcliff. He does deliver here, but maybe not quite in the way some might expect. He and his Catherine, Charlotte Riley, have relatively little chemistry, and at first it seems like a misstep: How are we supposed to buy this story of obsession if we can’t quite grasp the source of the obsession? Where is the romance, twisted or otherwise? But for this 2009 TV adaptation, presented as a two-part miniseries, writer Peter Bowker and director Coky Giedroyc take a subtly different approach, shuffling the timeline around somewhat. They focus on Heathcliff the monster, showing him terrorizing the next generation, and then give us the backstory in relatively brief flashbacks. They even sharply revise the dramatic fulcrum of Bronte’s story: This time, Heathcliff doesn’t overhear Catherine say that marrying him would degrade her; instead, she tells him directly that her marriage to Edgar Linton would be a way to protect him. As a result, Heathcliff’s exile isn’t the source of a misunderstanding but a more conscious one, borne of his own pride. And while Hardy doesn’t quite work as a romantic lead, he makes a compelling villain: a strange creature who refuses to understand basic human feelings.

The great Indian actor Dilip Kumar actually played Heathcliff three times; he was reportedly quite fascinated by the character, and by English literature in general. This, the first of his efforts, is a loose adaptation, directed by Shaheed Latif (and written by the director’s wife, the revolutionary novelist Ismat Chughtai), which does away with Heathcliff’s orphan background and instead makes him something of a layabout, an impoverished romantic whom many regard as “useless.” His character, Badal, is in love with local girl Kamini (Kamini Kaushal), who wants him to make something of himself. Everybody wants Kamini, whose beauty has bewitched multiple characters; her parents are mortified at the idea of her shacking up with Badal. After Badal is erroneously presumed dead in a fire, Kamini marries an absurdly wealthy local landowner and becomes a stuck-up shell of herself. Upon his return, Badal’s revenge is a mostly psychological one: He helps stage a production about betrayal, Hamlet-like, that drives Kamini to near madness. The dark complexity of Heathcliff isn’t in much evidence here. But Arzoo makes up for in elegance what it lacks in complexity. The bittersweet musical numbers lend all the characters — even the comic-relief ones — some modicum of humanity, and Latif’s playful visual style enhances the ironic elements of the tale. Example: When he romances the Isabel Linton character, Kamala (Shashikala), Badal calls her “Kamo,” his nickname for Kamini, and in one scene, he whispers sweet nothings to Kamala while secretly caressing Kamini’s hand in the background in a delightful bit of cinematic cruelty.

This beloved Filipino film sets Brontë’s tale among the lush hilltops and lovely beaches of Batanes, the northernmost and smallest province of the country. And its use of exteriors is one of its most notable features: If the canonical Wuthering Heights finds torment and heartbreak amid the dim, swampy moors of Northern England, this one finds those same things in the harsh sunlight. This is one of the more sensuous adaptations of the tale — casting then–romantic partners Richard Gomez and Dawn Zulueta as the central lovers, here named Gabriel and Carmina, certainly helps in that regard — and it all has the feel of a summertime romance gone to unfortunate extremes. Director Carlos Siguion-Reyna and writer Raquel Villavicencio lean into the class dynamics as well. The Illustre family, this version’s Lintons, spend all their time at the pool, in manicured and elegant spaces, a far cry from the natural world in which Gabriel and Carmina roam. We sense the isolation of their class as well as their smugness and casual cruelty. There’s a lot of soapy stuff in here, and some overzealous music cues, but all in all, it’s a snappy, charming addition to the Wuthering Heights legacy.

Often regarded as Egypt’s answer to Alfred Hitchcock, the great director Kamal al Sheikh was known for his noir-inflected, clear-eyed explorations of class. His 1956 adaptation of Wuthering Heights transposes the story to modern-day Egypt fairly seamlessly — we even get a recreation of Catherine’s “It would degrade me to marry Heathcliff” speech, only of course this time her name is Yasmine (played by Magda, one of Egyptian cinema’s greatest stars) and Heathcliff is Gharib (played by Yehia Chahine, himself no slouch in the icon department). Mapping the social expectations of Brontë’s England onto mid-20th-century Egypt, the film has a dark, tense atmosphere that serves the story well, with performances that are broad but psychologically authentic. This isn’t considered one of al Sheikh’s major films, but it’s tight, effective, and elegant — and gets extra points for being one of the earlier international adaptations of Wuthering Heights.

One year after he starred in Arzoo, Dilip Kumar went back to the Wuthering well with S. K. Ojha’s romantic drama, which takes a similarly free approach to the Brontë original. This one begins with our hero, Kishore (Kumar), as a prisoner who saves the life of a jailer (Balraj Sahni) during a prison break and then recounts to him the sad story of how he got there. Here, Kishore doesn’t leave because his Catherine, Asha (the iconic Nargis), was being courted by another, but because he was beaten by her brother, Chandan (K.N. Singh), and didn’t want to bring shame upon her family by eloping. Instead, Kishore winds up as a carnival performer, setting himself on fire and then diving from a great tower to a pool of water. His noirish adventures, which are more Nightmare Alley than Wuthering Heights, end up getting him wrongly accused of murder and in prison. Anyway, after Kishore’s tale is over, the jailer takes a shine to him and brings the young man home to introduce him to his wife — Asha! That’s where this story both clicks back in with Brontë’s classic and introduces a fun new wrinkle: In Kishore’s presence, Asha keeps hiding her face, because she doesn’t want him learning her identity. It all sounds a little ridiculous — and it is — but the luxurious production, with its imaginative musical numbers and deeply committed performances from some of Indian cinema’s greatest names, really sells the melodrama.

The Spanish filmmaker Luis Buñuel was one of the greatest directors who ever lived, and this little-seen effort, made during his years spent in Mexico, had been a kind of dream project; he had originally wanted to make it in 1931, back when he was largely known as the Surrealist who had made the scandalous Un Chien Andalou and L’Age d’Or. By the time he finally did, he had adopted a more narrative, histrionic style, albeit with a resilient undercurrent of weirdness. This version begins with Heathcliff’s (now renamed Alejandro) arrival back home, so it excises the all-important childhood part of the story. His obsession with Catherine (now Catalina) is referred to as a demonic force, but it’s really more an animalistic one. All throughout the film, there are images of terrible things being done to other creatures, as if to express the humans’ futile attempts to tamp down their natural urges. The hallucinatory final sequence, set in the crypt where Catalina’s body lies, is pure Buñuel: Alejandro descends the stairs and nestles up to her decomposing corpse; then, he thinks he sees her at the top of the stairs, stretching out her arms — but it’s really her brother, Ricardo, with a rifle, and he shoots Alejandro dead.

The young Timothy Dalton did not get good reviews upon the release of this motion picture adaptation of Wuthering Heights. Critics at the time seemed more impressed with the brooding landscapes — which probably were a relief after decades of television adaptations that had been limited in scale — than they were by the actors. But time has been very kind to him, and to this film in general. Dalton’s mesmerizing stare turns out to be perfect for Heathcliff: The actor exudes complexity and intelligence, those very qualities that probably worked against his turn as James Bond many years later. As Catherine, Anna Calder-Marshall is wonderfully earthy and boisterous. You see why someone could fall in love with her — and why someone could be so destroyed by her apparent rejection.  The whole film has an elemental, ground-level beauty that endures today, even after so many other versions.   

Pure, raw, uncut Richard Burton straight to the vein. Long believed lost, this 1958 CBS production, from that era when great filmmakers cut their teeth directing classic plays and novels and original dramas for TV broadcast, was unearthed in 2019. And it’s a good one: As Heathcliff, the insanely charismatic Burton is appropriately monstrous, volatile, obsessed, deranged; as Catherine, the great Rosemary Harris matches his delusion and heartbreak. Their chemistry is wonderfully mythic, almost alien. Meanwhile, a young Denholm Elliott makes for a delightfully smug Edgar Linton, and the underrated Angela Thornton brings to Isabella Linton a welcome sensuality. Oh, and Patty Duke plays Catherine as a child. The studio-bound TV direction (by Daniel Petrie, who would go on to make some great films, such as A Raisin in the Sun, Lifeguard, and Resurrection) might be rough by today’s standards — during a scene on the moors, you can hear the roaring fans used to make the flowers and weeds sway in the wind — but it actually winds up being an asset. The format required a lot of long takes, and Petrie’s camera is surprisingly fluid, sweeping from composed family scenes toward intense close-ups, resulting in a performance style that hovers between the intimate and the theatrical.

Everyone in Jacques Rivette’s version of Wuthering Heights looks and acts like a supermodel: They are thin, stone-faced, gorgeous, and cruel. Transposing the film to the 1930s French countryside, the Nouvelle Vague legend attempted to directly counter the fervent romanticism of classic adaptations of Brontë’s novel by highlighting the matter-of-fact savagery of the characters. (The film instead uses lyricism as ironic counterpoint through its lovely location work and needle-drops from the then-popular Balkan choir Le Mystere des Voix Bulgares.) Rivette also does away with the childhood sections and instead picks the story up not long after the death of Mr. Earnshaw, as Guillaume (Olivier Cruveiller, this version’s Hindley) begins his brutal domination of the family. As Rivette’s Heathcliff (here named Roch, and played by future filmmaker Lucas Belvaux) and his Catherine (Fabienne Babe) traipse around the countryside, we sense not innocent communion but a tantalizing, secret dalliance. Later, when Roch returns after his exile, he seems too young for his fine clothes. Actually, everyone seems too young, almost as if they’re play-acting a vision of class relations that’s been drilled into their heads long ago. (Rivette specifically wanted to correct the tradition of having 30- and 40-plus-year-old actors playing these characters.) This film doesn’t let anyone off the hook: Roch is a real lout; his “seduction” of Isabelle (Alice de Poncheville) is closer to a rape. Interestingly, the biggest change is to the Nelly character, Hélène (Sandra Montaigu), who isn’t just a maid but a prime motivator of the action and also the brutalized object of Guillaume’s affections. In some senses, she’s the only sensible character here.

Photo: BBC Four

For the literary purists out there, this might be the most faithful adaptation of them all. Reaching across five hourlong episodes, Peter Hammond’s BBC miniseries diligently translates the novel to the screen, with video soundstage interiors jutting up against celluloid exteriors. And it has one of the best Catherines in Kay Adsheid, who brings a level of eloquence and intelligence to a character all too often reduced to a frail, flighty victim. Her “I am Heathcliff” speech, delivered against a roaring fireplace that silhouettes her in profile, is probably the best version of that pivotal moment to date. And director Hammond doesn’t let the primitive miniseries technology defeat him. He uses his long shots (a typical feature of this type of production at the time) to reframe the characters as they move about, always trying to find interesting angles that add depth to the drama. As Heathcliff, Ken Hutchison is appropriately grim and moody, but not too memorable.

Emerald Fennell’s pictorial talents — her ability to conjure images of striking, almost fantastical beauty — mesh remarkably well with the twisted, heated emotions of Brontë’s novel. Other artists have tried to tackle this melodrama by grounding us in specific characters’ perspectives, or by heightening the performances, but Fennell embraces the story’s fundamental absurdism by giving us absurd and often glorious images. And she’s found a beautiful Heathcliff in Jacob Elordi, whose lanky frame can be sexy one minute, sinister the next, a perfect choice for this BDSM-inflected variation on the story. There are interesting folds to this Catherine as well. Opening the film with her as a young girl cheering on a public hanging is a brazen, maybe even brilliant way to seed the character’s submerged sadism (which, let’s face it, is absolutely present in the novel as well). And Margot Robbie gives the character a sharpness, an agency that’s a relief from the wilting Catherines of yore — which actually makes her ultimate gruesome fate feel that much more tragic. Fennell’s version is the horniest Wuthering yet. The director just wants to watch these two go at it, and really, who can blame her? Where the film falters, however, is in the liberties it takes with the novel — not because artists must stick to the source material, but because removing Hindley from the story reduces the scale of the wrong that’s been done to Heathcliff, which in turn removes a key character motivation. But maybe that’s also part of the point: This Heathcliff’s monstrousness doesn’t come from a great social injustice but from somewhere within.

The great Ian McShane, whose star rose again later in his career with turns in Deadwood and John Wick, might well have been the best Heathcliff. With his wide, hungry eyes and deathly glower, he brings just the right combination of mystery and compassion to the part. He gets the anguish right, he gets the romanticism right, and he gets the cruelty right. The actor’s dark features also work for the ambiguity around Heathcliff’s origins — he looks like a genuine outsider next to the other cast members. After multiple shorter adaptations of the novel, this was the BBC’s first attempt to turn the entire book into a longer miniseries, and it’s a very good effort. Opting for a linear narrative, it saves Heathcliff’s transformation for its back end, which preserves the surprise and the heartbreak of his turn to the menacing. This miniseries also captures a truth about Brontë’s novel that most other adaptations ignore: Every character in this story — not just Heathcliff and Catherine, but also Hindley, Edgar, Isabel, and others — experiences their own tragedy. This version gives everyone their humanity back. Its only real shortcoming is that not all the actors are at McShane’s level, and as Catherine, Angela Scoular unfortunately lacks the range to keep up with her Heathcliff. The series was shot and broadcast in color, but only black-and-white versions have survived.

It’s crazy to think that Ralph Fiennes’s very first movie role was as Heathcliff. The man was an acclaimed theater actor at the time, but still, talk about getting thrown into the deep end. And he’s marvelous in the role, which retains the darkness and complexity of Brontë’s original. This is the rare movie adaptation that does cover the second half of the book, and our first glimpse of Heathcliff is as the domineering terror of his later years. Fiennes’s piercing eyes and stern mouth — that judgmental stare of his, which he’s put to such great effect onscreen over the years — are appropriately haunting. As his younger, more romantic self, that hardness never quite goes away. But he layers tenderness beneath that exterior. Listen to his voice break when he confronts the ailing Catherine and tells her that she’s broken her own heart, “and in breaking it, you’ve broken mine.” These are words of accusation, but we sense his woundedness, too. This Heathcliff will never be a victim, but we actually understand him and feel for him. It helps of course that Fiennes is acting opposite Juliette Binoche, who plays both Catherines. They have great chemistry in this, their first onscreen pairing. (They would later appear together, to greater acclaim, in The English Patient and The Return.) Peter Kosminsky’s film wasn’t particularly well regarded in its time, but it really holds up, with atmospheric location work and a gorgeous score by the great Ryuichi Sakamoto, who might be the real MVP of the whole thing.

Photo: Orson Video

The second time Dilip Kumar played a version of Heathcliff, he was in his mid-40s and not exactly the picture of youthful charisma. And this handsomely mounted musical was considered something of a disappointment at the time. In fact, it’s wonderful: From its opening frames depicting a shipwreck to its feverish, colorful set design to its diverse musical numbers, it has a cinematic expressiveness that matches the high emotions on display. (The plaintive title song, which translates as “I gave my heart and took your pain in return,” is an all-timer.) The plot is, as usual, more “inspired” by Wuthering Heights than a direct adaptation of it, and similar to other Indian versions, it foregrounds romantic betrayal and revenge. But it fills in some character psychology as well: Here, Shankar’s (the Heathcliff character) obsessive love for Rupa (Waheeda Rehman) is specifically rooted in the fact that he has no one else in the world, an emotional detail that seems obvious in retrospect but is rarely noted in Brontë adaptations. Of course, in this version Shankar also turns out to be the heir to a kingdom. And once he flees and discovers his true heritage, he becomes a soft-spoken angel of vengeance, manipulating things in spectacular fashion to destroy the life of Thakur Ramesh (the Hindley of this version, played by Pran) and save Rupa from the clutches of a marriage she’s entering solely to repair the damage done to her family’s reputation by her sleazebag alcoholic brother. This is just about the most visually splendid of the many Hindi spins on Wuthering Heights. It’s also the one with the most memorable songs.

Andrea Arnold does something with her adaptation of the novel that no other filmmaker before has truly attempted. No, I’m not talking about the casting of a nonwhite actor to play Heathcliff, though that too is one of this film’s refreshing distinguishing features. (This is an ongoing debate, though there’s enough evidence in Brontë’s novel and what little we know of her life to suggest that Heathcliff would not have been considered white by the standards of the time.) Arnold’s true accomplishment lies in the way she sticks to Heathcliff’s perspective with her characteristically handheld, vérité camerawork. This is the only adaptation of the story that actually tries to make us understand how it feels to be Heathcliff, to see this strange new world through his eyes. And this strikingly immediate version foregrounds intimacy and texture. The characters live in a world of mud, rain, wind, and animalistic yearning, reflecting the bugs and birds and rabbits and dogs and livestock that surround them. As Heathcliff, Solomon Glave (who plays him in his youth) and James Howson (who plays him as a grown-up) are mostly silent, and Catherine (played by Shannon Beer and Kaya Scodelario) isn’t all that different: Her “It would degrade me to marry Heathcliff” speech is played as a kind of distant, almost offhand observation. In other words, it’s not the misunderstanding it is in the novel and so many of its adaptations; if anything, Heathcliff understands her perfectly well. True, in making the characters so terse and their world so raw and unforgiving, Arnold loses some of the poetry of Brontë, but she replaces it with her own. Her film offers a clinic in how to revitalize a classic work of literature while still remaining largely faithful to it.

William Wyler’s classic MGM adaptation of Brontë’s novel was not the first film version of the book — there was actually a 1920 British silent, now lost to the ages, that was billed as a “tremendous story of Hate.” Contrast that with the trailers for the 1939 film, which declared it “the greatest love story of our time — or any time!” How different things might have been if that earlier silent version, that “story of Hate,” had been the one to achieve cinematic immortality. Because many of the adaptations of Wuthering Heights are, in truth, variations on Wyler’s picture, which was insanely successful all over the world. Its popularity is easy to understand. It’s unabashedly romantic, foregrounding Heathcliff’s status as a wronged lover and downplaying much of his cruelty. But what the script sweeps under, Laurence Olivier’s performance brings back out to some extent. The actor is probably a bit too regal and reserved to play the character as a romantic and rough-mannered youth, but he comes into his own when Heathcliff returns from exile dashing and cool and ruthless. Olivier’s penetrating eyes say what his words can’t.

Although it probably is the chief culprit in the 20th-century reinvention of Wuthering Heights as primarily a love story, this is still a great, great film. Wyler was a master, and he and cinematographer Gregg Toland (who won his only Oscar for this) expertly utilize depth of focus and shadow to visually render the story’s emotional landscape. The gray emptiness of Wuthering Heights contrasts with the warmth and bubbliness of Thrushcross Grange, which perfectly showcases why Catherine (a fantastic Merle Oberon) would want to live there instead. Meanwhile, the windswept moors feel like something out of a classic thriller, forbidding and alluring at once. This Wuthering Heights is one of the crown jewels of the Golden Age of Hollywood, full of elegance and atmosphere and spirit.

Photo: Toho/Everett Collection

To all the folks who get upset when the movies let Heathcliff off the hook: This one’s for you. In transposing Brontë’s tale to medieval Japan, director Yoshishige Yoshida goes so dark that he turns Wuthering Heights into something closer to a supernatural horror movie. The two families at the center of the story are warring for conquest of a volcanic holy mountain; their various alliances over the course of the film are not attempts at class preservation but rather ritualistic power plays. Yoshida had studied Georges Bataille before embarking on this project: The French thinker was fascinated by what he saw as the transgressive immorality of Brontë’s book, her ability to draw lines between love, destruction, and the futility of existence. Embracing these ideas wholeheartedly, Yoshida’s borderline psychotic reimagining of the tale is both highly symbolic and totally riveting. Its stark, alien landscape — with striking production design by the legendary Yoshirô Muraki (Ran, Kagemusha, Throne of Blood) — doesn’t feel earthly in any way, shape, or form. And this Heathcliff, who is given the name Onimaru (which we’re told means “demoniac”), is a genuine monster. The film sticks to the broad beats of the classic story, but it pushes things to almost shocking extremes. Onimaru doesn’t just dig up the corpse of his beloved Kinu (Yūko Tanaka); he actually takes it home and keeps the rotting skeleton in his “forbidden room.” When Kinu declares that she is Heathcliff, it’s not the canonical expression of deep dedication; it’s more an acknowledgement of demonic possession. Onimaru doesn’t just terrorize Kinu’s daughter (who might actually be his); he tries to rape her. And when Onimaru is finally vanquished at the end, our last sight of him is not of a ghostly figure reunited with Kinu in a bucolic afterlife; it’s of a distant figure dragging a coffin along an ash-covered mountainside.