Laurence Olivier played Heathcliffe? Are you making that up? That seems... incredible. I can't imagine any actor less Heathcliffe-like. (Or... very few.)
It's awful. They changed the setting to the 1840s (instead of 1770s-early 1800s), and missed out the next generation entirely, so you don't get the plotline of Heathcliff abusing his wife and the children. More people are fmiliar with the film than with the novel, so they have this love-story plot stuck in their minds, and don't know about the worst. The best adaptations I have seen are a BBC serialisation from 1978, and the Ralph Fiennes/Juliette Binoche film, which kept the multi-generation structure. Ralph Fiennes isn't obvious casting (indeed, there are a few hints in the book that Heathcliff may not be white European at all), but he is very, very chilling and nasty.
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timeasmymeasure
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Date: 2009-03-21 12:47 pm (UTC)It's awful. They changed the setting to the 1840s (instead of 1770s-early 1800s), and missed out the next generation entirely, so you don't get the plotline of Heathcliff abusing his wife and the children. More people are fmiliar with the film than with the novel, so they have this love-story plot stuck in their minds, and don't know about the worst. The best adaptations I have seen are a BBC serialisation from 1978, and the Ralph Fiennes/Juliette Binoche film, which kept the multi-generation structure. Ralph Fiennes isn't obvious casting (indeed, there are a few hints in the book that Heathcliff may not be white European at all), but he is very, very chilling and nasty.