Wuthering Heights

The second 1976 album of Genesis, Wind & Wuthering was also largely inspired by the novel. The film is consistently in the Internet Movie Database's list of top 250 films, was #18 on American Film Institute's 100 Years, 100 Laughs, and has been deemed "culturally significant" by the United States Library of Congress and selected for preservation in the National Film Registry. (see Wuthering Heights (band)). Audiences and critics would later agree with him after re-considering the film, and it is now considered a classic. Wuthering Heights is also the name of a Danish Heavy Metal band. It was not one of Keaton's biggest box office successes, which disappointed him as he considered it to be the best of all his movies. Carlisle Floyd wrote an opera based on this novel in 1958. The General received only mediocre reviews upon its release.

The song was later covered by Pat Benatar. The metal of the train was salvaged for scrap during World War II. Kate Bush was inspired to write the song after watching the 1939 version of the film and the fact that she shares the same birthday as Emily Brontė: July 30. The production company could not afford to remove the wreckage after the scene was filmed, so they left it there, where it became a minor tourist attraction for nearly twenty years. Its lyrics are based on the story of the novel. This scene was one of the single most expensive shots in motion picture history at the time, though Keaton felt it was worth it. It quickly reached number one in the UK pop charts, and propelled the singer to widespread fame. The climax of the film includes a spectacular moment where a bridge (sabotaged by Keaton's character) collapses as a railroad train crosses it (compare The Bridge on the River Kwai).

It appears on her 1978 debut album, The Kick Inside, and was also released as her debut single. Keaton performs lots of dangerous physical stunts on and around the moving train, which include jumping from the engine to a boxcar, sitting on the cow-catcher, and running along the roof. Wuthering Heights is also the title of a song by Kate Bush. The event was also the subject of the film The Great Locomotive Chase. It is a parody of the original story, free for download here: http://philippe.tromeur.free.fr/rene.htm
. Although played for laughs in the film, many of the events actually occurred in a chase through Georgia and Tennessee between trains pulled by locomotives named General and Texas (see Great Locomotive Chase for more details on the actual event). The Wuthering Heights Roleplay game is a role-playing game based on the French "René le Jeu de Rōle Romantique" by Philippe Tromeur. The plot turns on a chase between two locomotives and a railroad worker, played by Keaton, initially on a handcart and later on another locomotive.

Sadly, this version does not survive in the BBC archives. It was adapted by Al Boasberg, Bruckman, Keaton, Charles Henry Smith (uncredited) and Paul Girard Smith (uncredited) from the memoir The Great Locomotive Chase by William Pittenger. A 1953 adaptation on BBC Television was scripted by Nigel Kneale, directed by Rudolph Cartier and starred Yvonne Mitchell as Cathy. The General is a 1927 silent comedy about a bumbling Confederate engineer (train driver) who pursues Union spies who steal his beloved locomotive, The General, which incidentally also carries his estranged girlfriend as well. Buster Keaton starred in the film and co-directed it with Clyde Bruckman. Ralph Fiennes plays Heathcliff. Juliette Binoche plays two roles, Catherine Earnshaw and her daughter.

A 1992 film adaptation was the first one to show both generations from the story; that is Heathcliff, Cathy, Edgar, and Hindley, as well as their children. The movie was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Picture. It was directed by William Wyler. The film was adapted by Charles MacArthur, Ben Hecht and John Huston.

Carroll as Joseph Earnshaw. Kenneth, Geraldine Fitzgerald as Isabella Linton and Leo G. It stars Merle Oberon as Cathy Linton, Laurence Olivier as Heathcliff, David Niven as Edgar Linton, Flora Robson as Ellen Dean, Donald Crisp as Dr. Perhaps the best-known of the film adaptations was released in 1939.

Camus juxtaposes the concept of Heathcliff's reaction to Cathy with the reaction of a disenchanted rebel to the ideal he once held. Both are driven by a sort of madness: one by misguided love, the other by oppression. In Albert Camus' essay The Rebel, Heathcliff is compared to a rebel leader. Instead, Cathy marries a wealthy neighbour, Edgar Linton, and the embittered Heathcliff sets out to ruin the fortunes of her family, which he does over a period of many years.

The anti-hero is the foundling Heathcliff, who is taken in by the wealthy Earnshaw family as a child, and falls in love with their daughter, Catherine. Catherine is also attached to Heathcliff, but he is not considered good enough to marry her. Subsequent critics revised this view; most would agree that Wuthering Heights's originality and achievement exceeded anything that her sisters Charlotte and Anne had ever attempted. Some contemporaneous critics even believed it to be an earlier, less mature work from Charlotte Brontė, who had also published Jane Eyre that same year under a pseudonym. Wuthering Heights 's innovative structure, which has been likened to a series of Chinese boxes, puzzled critics when the novel first appeared, and reception was lukewarm at best.

Nelly Dean, the secondary narrator, recounts scenes of strong emotion, violence, infanticide and sadism in a manner which is not completely dispassionate, but somewhat detached; she is not surprised at the extremes she recounts. This framing device gives distance to the events. It takes the form of the first-person narrative of a minor character, Lockwood, who through conversations is told the tale of the principal protagonists. The setting for the book is Brontė's native Yorkshire moors.

A posthumous second edition was edited by her sister Charlotte. Published in 1847, under the pseudonym Ellis Bell, it has become a classic of English literature, and has given rise to many adaptations, including several films, radio and television dramatisations, and a musical, as well as inspiring a hit song by Kate Bush. Wuthering Heights is Emily Brontė's only novel.