Directed by Alan Burke Based on novel by Emily Bronte Initial release 28 October 1959 | Distributed by ABC Director Alan Burke Story by Emily Brontë | |
Starring Lew LutonDelia Williams Release date 28 October 1959 (live, Sydney)9 December Melbourne (recorded, Melbourne) Production company American Broadcasting Company Similar Hurlevent, Emily Brontë's Wutherin, Dil Diya Dard Liya, Look Back in Anger, The Entertainer | ||
Cathy s theme from wuthering heights 1939 alfred newman
Wuthering Heights is a 1959 Australian TV play adapted from the novel Wuthering Heights. It was directed by Alan Burke and based on a script by Nigel Kneale.
Contents
Cast
Production
The story was mostly filmed live, but some segments were pre-recorded around Sydney. Lew Luton was a DJ and presenter of teen shows at the time.
Reception
It was one of three plays that Alan Burke directed that year. He said they all received "tiny ratings" and that Wuthering Heights "was too large for our television conditions, and things went wrong."
The reviewer for The Age said the play was disappointing and that "the atmosphere of bleakness and howling winds was not created with realism. Noises off were much too prevalent. The casting was not up to standard. . . . Luton showed a lack of understanding on the part of both actor and producer."
The TV critic for the Sydney Morning Herald thought the play was "straightforward enough in its story-telling and sufficiently wide-ranging in its techniques" but "hardly ever caught the necessary brooding Gothic spirit of the time, the place and the situation." He criticized Lew Luton as being too often "merely surly, when he should have been daemonic, and in general failed to reconcile his desire to work like a twentieth century actor." Other actors were praised, and Alan Burke's direction was called "carefully smooth; but there were moments when the spirit of the production was closer to Stella Gibbons than to Emily Bronte."