Wuthering Heights | 1970
- Locations |
- North Yorkshire
- DIRECTOR |
- Robert Fuest
The 1970 adaptation of Wuthering Heights is a solid old-fashioned costume drama (weren't they terribly, terribly clean?) which like most other adaptations jettisons the second half of the story. A bold move is the suggestion that Heathcliff is Cathy's half-brother, but the film winds up with a ludicrous ending that feels like one of those last-minute reshoots ordered by a cigar-chomping exec in the 1930s.
As with all the post-Hollywood versions it stays faithful to the Yorkshire Moors location, filming in the area west of Harrogate in North Yorkshire. And this is where you'll find the striking rock formations against which Cathy (Anna Calder-Marshall) and Heathcliff (Timothy Dalton), play out first their careless youth then tortured romance, which are Brimham Rocks, Brimham Moor Road, Summerbridge, about eight miles north-west of Harrogate.
Once known as Brimham Crags, this outcrop of Millstone Grit has been eroded into such shapes that for a long time they were believed to have been – at least partly – carved by Druids.
It's now a designated Site of Special Scientific Interest and a National Trust property, supporting localised plant forms, such as chickweed-wintergreen, cowberry, bog asphodel and no fewer than three species of heather.
It was also here that Jane (Charlotte Gainsbourg) first met Mr Rochester (William Hurt) in the 1996 adaptation of Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre.
The film begins with Cathy's funeral, watched from horseback by a distant Heathcliff, filmed on what appears to be private land by Harden Gill Beck, west of the remaining little hamlet of West End (the village of West End itself disappeared beneath the waters of the Thruscross Reservoir in the 1960s).
A little to the southeast, 'Wuthering Heights' is the Grade II-listed Redshaw Grange, a private home off West End Lane south of Thruscross Reservoir. The Reservoir was only created in the 1960s but the parish of Thruscross seems to have inspired the name of Emily Brontë's 'Thrushcross Grange'.
'Thrushcross Grange' itself, home of the Lintons, in this adaptation is Weston Hall, Church Lane, Otley, which stands on the road to Ilkley, above the River Wharfe. The Hall and the Banqueting Tower are both Grade I-listed and the Tithe Barn and Ice House are Grade II. It's open to visitors for 28 days a year (entrance fee).
The film was commercially successful enough that a sequel was announced – though never made – called Return to Wuthering Heights. A year later, director Robert Fuest made a much better choice, directing camp classic The Abominable Dr Phibes, with Vincent Price.
