Read about another entry on the list.Wuthering Heights by William Wyler
I’m tempted to go with Luis Buñuel’s 1954 version, Abismos de Pasión, and give the edge to the surrealists, who knew a thing or two about irrational, death-obsessed love. But it is the 1939 film that we know. Laurence Olivier and Merle Oberon look like two gorillas in heat, and the scenes of the Yorkshire moors were filmed in the Conejo Valley of Ventura County, with what appears to be a giant umbrella put over it. But the failures end up resembling genuine strangeness—ugly, spooky and captivating—which is what makes Emily Brontë’s novel so good in the first place.
Wuthering Heights appears on John Mullan's lists of ten of the best thunderstorms in literature, ten of the worst nightmares in literature and ten of the best foundlings in literature, Valerie Martin's list of novels about doomed marriages, Susan Cheever's list of the five best books about obsession, and Melissa Katsoulis' top 25 list of book to film adaptations. It is one of John Inverdale's six best books and Sheila Hancock's six best books.
The Page 99 Test: Wuthering Heights.
--Marshal Zeringue
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