Wuthering Heights

A determined researcher was responsible for the discovery of the sole surviving kinescope of this adaptation of Emily Brontë’s 1847 novel, which was broadcast live on the CBS Network on May 9, 1958 as an episode of the DuPont Show of the Month and then disappeared. Written by James Costigan and directed by Daniel Petrie, the program was notable for being the first American television appearance of Richard Burton, who played Heathcliff; his co-star as Catharine, the woman Heathcliff loves but loses to another, sparking his intense desire for revenge, was Rosemary Harris, who had stepped into the role at the last minute after Yvonne Furneaux, the actress originally tapped to play the part by producer David Susskind, was fired. In 1999 Harris asked Jane Klain, a researcher at the Paley Center for Media in New York, to track down a copy of the program. It was not until the spring of 2019, however, that Klain finally located it in the collection of a television historian recently acquired by the Library of Congress. She not only provided a copy of the kinescope to Harris but made it available to the Turner Classic Movie channel, which broadcast it as part of a Burton retrospective. Now it has become available on DVD, raising the question of whether Klain’s decades-long effort was worth the trouble. While this version will never displace other adaptations—particularly the classic 1939 William Wyler film starring Laurence Olivier and Merle Oberon—it is more than just an interesting relic from a bygone television era. Like Wyler’s film, it jettisons the second half of the book, but also lacks the sumptuous images that master cinematographer Gregg Toland and the other behind-the-scenes craftsmen captured for Wyler; here the sets are rickety, the camerawork shaky, and the resolution blurred. Still, Burton makes a compelling Heathcliff; though he makes no concession to the intimacy of the medium, performing as though trying to project to the last rows of a large auditorium, his voice is such a magnificent instrument that it carries everything before it. The rest of the cast is variable, but Harris makes a lovely Cathy, and Denholm Elliot is excellent as the man she marries. The film is also interesting in that the young Catherine is played by then eleven-year old Patty Duke in one of her first professional roles, and young Heathcliff by Michel Ray, who went on to appear as one of Peter O’Toole’s young Arab followers in Lawrence of Arabia. The kinescope is presented on the DVD just as it was broadcast, with the announcer’s introductions—as well as all the DuPont commercials promising 'a better life through chemistry'—intact. Some may find these intrusive, but oddly they preserve the 'special event' feeling the original program would have had. Especially for Burton fans and those interested in what is often referred to as the golden age of television, a strong optional purchase.