27 thoughts on “SNARK WEEK: Stop Remaking Wuthering Heights

  1. Why am I thinking Little House
    (I hate. Abhor detest L,I Wilder). Give Me Austen, Montgomery and Gaskell anyday. And I’ve seen better derpy bonnets elsewhere

  2. At first I thought this was actually SUPPOSED to be set in Great Falls, but there were certainly no white people running around in 1700s Montana (except perhaps a few intrepid French trappers). I cannot even believe how awful this was. Even when I was a high school student (and I had at least one of those Gunny Sax dresses pictured) I would have known better than to costume this way.
    Emily Bronte’s rolling in her grave.

  3. This looks quite bad, but also that it barely qualifies as a movie. Like did a Montana community college put this on? Or did a bunch of people auditioning for one of the “Yellowstone” tv shows get tricked into the wrong van?
    Bless their hearts.

  4. OMFG, Montana? As for those faux-faux-lace sleeves… Did this confection start out as a parody? Anyway, NO MORE EMILY!!! Let the woman slumber in her quiet earth. We do not care about your creative vision, so go exercise your film-school chops on someone else; discover some new and deserving female geniuses. No more Jane, either, for that matter. (One can actually buy Jane Austen Tarot cards.)

    There–thanks for enduring the rant. And don’t let me get started about Kahlo’s image on tea towels.

  5. This looks sooooo awful. I HAVE to see it.

    But CLEARLY y’all haven’t seen “Wuthering High.” No, that’s not misspelled. It’s high school!! And it stars James Caan. I mean, I ACTUALLY watched it. Those kids were soooooo earnest….I coulda actually been great…

    https://youtu.be/CaXsf_MR9Bk

  6. Bummed I didn’t see my prom dress (1976) in there. I think it went to Goodwill, so might exist somewhere in the world.

  7. I had a look on imdb and it seems the guy who directed this and stars as Heathcliff is an amateur auteur in the vein of Tommy Wiseau. Here’s what I don’t get. If you don’t have a budget and also can’t be arsed to do research on the period the novel is set in (“anything goes as long as it looks ye oldey timey” really seems to have been the guiding principle), then why bother, why not rethink it? Could have been deliberately set in a different location and more recent time period, could have been a short film to optimize the limited resources. There are so many ways to get creative if you have some self-awareness and your motivation is to actually make an interesting and watchable work.

    1. Oh, but Sophie…it’s been done! There exists [and I actually watched it], a contemporary take on Wuthering Heights called… “Wuthering High” (as in High School). And it stars, of all people, the late James Caan. The young lead actors were sooo earnest, and I think that concept was very interesting, but the execution… oh dear. Here’s a link to the trailer: https://youtu.be/CaXsf_MR9Bk and to the actual movie: https://youtu.be/rM6NBtjLdG8

      As for the version reviewed here, I mean, I feel like now I have to see it! Overall, I say: Do we need another Heathcliffe after Ralph Fiennes??

    2. I have seen so many middling ‘modern’ independent film adaptations of various Shakespeare plays (most often a Midsummer Night’s Dream but also Romeo and Juliet) but no matter how bad they are, at least I can give them credit for knowing that 1) they don’t have the budget to stage a convincing historical adaptation and 2) whatever local college drama majors they hired probably don’t have it in them to pull off a convincing (or even bog standard) English accent.

    3. Quite right. Hell, he could have transposed W.H. to ’50s Montana or something, with Heathcliff a Native orphan Mr. Earnshaw found in the city, etc.

  8. diabolical! Excellent snarking. I remember making a Gunne Saxe outfit for my sister many moons ago. Because she wanted it all black instead of the usual pastel shades, the lace inserts cost more than all the miles of fabric. It ended up being worn by her, then me, for years and then eventually got used up in a school play, where it breathed its last. Quite good value for money in the end! https://i.pinimg.com/564x/61/3c/52/613c527083923ce228a49b466974ef9f.jpg

  9. Lord have mercy! I’ve seen better costumes and settings in Dark Shadows! The yellow wallpaper behind the first Gunne Sax dress is Arts and Crafts ca. 1900, and looks like Anaglypta. The house the 3 of them are standing in front of is Victorian, and the trellis-like fence a few photos later is fucking modern. The dresses do take the cake, though. Just incredibly lazy and ignorant. I hope this travesty doesn’t spawn a whole new generation of people who won’t know a granny dress from a wrapper…

  10. A few years ago, for her 12th-grade English class, my daughter dressed as every major character in “Wuthering Heights” for a slideshow. She used clothing & old costumes found around the house, and the results were far better than this.

  11. I have never much liked any of the Bronte stories…too bleak and unpleasant maybe though that has not put me off other bleak things lol…but I do enjoy shows about the Brontes I.e Brontes of Haworth…it took me a lot of watches to realize that “poor Bramwell is Michael Kitchen who has been in lots of frock flicks including The Buccaneers as Guy Thwaite’s father and the romanced of the governess…

  12. Why do so many Wuthering Heights adaptations look so cheap? If you don’t have the budget to commit to a historical piece, don’t do one

  13. Quite right! There have been too many adaptations and each and every one manages to mess up the plotline, design, casting, or all three. It is all most irritating because I love the book – although I need to be in a melancholy and whimsical mood before I attempt it. Much like my relationship with Tess of the d’Urbervilles. This production looks, probably, the second most dire I’ve ever been exposed to. The costumes are awful, I am actually offended by the Gunne Sax usage and the repeat use of the same garments on other actors is unforgivable. The green spencer is so badly constructed and the fit is atrocious on both actors who have been forced into it. If you are going to do something on a small budget there are crafty ways and means to get an appropriate period look – maybe mass buy some suitable white/coloured cotton, an accurate pattern – the Jane Austen Centre in Bath has a great dress pattern on their online blog (https://janeausten.co.uk/blogs/fashion-to-make/sew-a-regency-gown) and find someone who can sew. Voila! As many suitable empire line gowns (if that’s what you have decided your committing too, as I have my niggles over the correct period style they have chosen for the earlier years – I think some Robe à l’Anglaise would be a lot more suitable… why not hit the Janet Arnold – Patterns Of Fashion 1 for those) as you like for very little output. It is so annoying when people believe that no one will notice that they have put 0% effort into the costume side of production. Bah!

  14. I’m almost 100% certain that light aqua dress on Frances under the black spencer is also a Gunne.

  15. I’m now imagining someone putting down Wuthering Heights, and trying to make a movie out of Emily Bronte’s poetry.

  16. Somewhere, somehow, Doctor Polidori’s THE VAMPYRE is pricking up his ears and trying to look fashionably disinterested by the (presumably false) hope offered in the title of this article: he’s lean, he’s mean, he somehow keeps them keen – Byronic? Lord Ruthven IS Lord Byron as a blood-sucking monster! – he can do brooding, he can do seductive, he can do manipulative (he LIKES making life miserable for nice people, on the sly!) – he’s Dracula’s more successful grandad (as in ‘no Victorian train nerds murder HIM’ as opposed to ‘I sold more books’ successful): Come on, BBC, given him a call – m’lord wants his own Fan Girls and you need a hot jerk who looks good in period!

  17. This is MY FAVORITE BOOK OF ALL TIME (caps necessary), and I’d be the first to admit that it’s never going to get an adaptation that does it justice. Wuthering Heights is dark, funny, dirty, and NOT meant to be a love story between Cathy and Heathcliff. Literally, the first time we see Cathy she is shaking an actual baby, and Heathcliff is cruel to puppies and takes a knife to the neck of his pregnant wife. Plus, a lot of adaptations only film the first half of the book, which is WAY missing the point, because the second half is where all the generational trauma really rears its ugly head. So, the perfect WH movie will only exist in my mind. (Although, one of the Nineties versions has Janet McTeer as my girl Nelly Dean, and she was PERFECT. That woman takes no shit from anyone!)

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