Like many others, I was introduced to Emily Bronte’s novel, Wuthering Heights, in high school, and it immediately became a favorite of mine. It’s pretty heavy stuff for young students, even today, with the utterly monstrous cruelty of Heathcliff, its depiction of passionate romantic “love” way beyond the breathy infatuation of Romeo and Juliet, not to mention sadism and hints of necrophilia.
The film adaption (1939) with Laurence Olivier is justly famous – he’s magnetic in the role of Heathcliff, handsome and dark, smoothly cruel and contemptuous, but I think that Luis Bunuel’s Mexican version, Abismos de pasión (1953), not to be confused with the telenovella with a similar name!, is far more true to the spirit of the novel. Bunuel makes clear, with a bit of text at the start of the picture, that that was his primary intention in adapting it.
The Hollywood version of the story is far more decorous than the novel, which takes place in the northern moors among people whom polite Londoners would have regarded as practically savages. Note the elaborate and refined dress of the characters in the 1939 clip, their polished way of speaking, and the ornate, totally urban, architecture in the background. The attraction of Heathcliff and Cathy is much more doomed love than hate – something not so clear in the novel – and the mood is one of romantic possession gone a bit off the tracks.
Bunuel’s version takes place in rural Mexico, and the architecture is rough, often primitive. The landscape is dry and forbidding. Alejandro is rough, curt, and resolutely brutal. His feelings for Catalina are a mix of obsessive love and equally obsessive hate for everything her family represents to him and recalls to his memory. Catalina is rather cold and clear-eyed about her marriage and emotional predicament: Clearly things will not end well. That’s Wuthering Heights!
The final scene of Abismos is classic Bunuel, from the use of Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde Liebstod, to the image of the rifle barrel appearing from the side of the frame to end Alejandro’s agony as he hallucinates that his dead lover is risen to marry him, and he pitches into her open coffin with her corpse.