by Stephen Vagg
This article is a shameless attempt to cash in on the release of Wuthering Heights, starring Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi. In light of that, we thought it was time to remind readers that Australia did its own version of the classic Emily Brontë novel years ago – specifically, in 1959 when the ABC filmed it at its Gore Hill Studios in Sydney.
For those who don’t know, the story of Wuthering Heights concerns Heathcliff, an orphan who is adopted by the Earnshaw family at Wuthering Heights on the Yorkshire Moors. He loves Cathy Earnshaw and is hated by her brother Hindley. Cathy rejects Heathcliff, so he leaves, and she marries Edgar. Heathcliff returns years later, a wealthy man, and takes up residence as master of Wuthering Heights. He marries Edgar’s sister Isabella in order to make Cathy jealous, and it all ends badly.
Wuthering Heights – a terrific novel, by the way – has been adapted numerous times over the years for film, radio, opera, musical, play, graphic novels, etc. The best -known adaptation (until this year) is probably the 1939 film with Laurence Olivier and Merle Oberon – although AIP tried their luck with Timothy Dalton in 1970, and Cliff Richard did a musical Heathcliff, and there was a very respected 1953 BBC television version starring Richard Todd from a script by Nigel (Quatermass Experiment) Kneale. In fact, that BBC version was so respected that in 1959 the ABC decided “wow let’s use 1700 pounds to shoot this script even though it would be cheaper just to import a kinescope of the BBC production and we could have spent the rest of the funds on shooting a something local.” Incidentally, the BBC filmed Kneale’s script again in 1962 with Claire Bloom and Australia’s own Keith Michell in the leads – so, even if Kneale wrote it very hastily, by his own admission, he did pretty well out of it.
We’ll be upfront – we haven’t seen the 1959 ABC TV film of Wuthering Heights. It’s entirely possible that no copy survives – but we’ve read a lot about it and reproduce what knowledge we’ve ascertained below.
The driving force behind the production was director Alan Burke, who specifically asked to do it. Burke was a competent director and from all accounts a very nice man, but like many Australian directors of his time (and now) he really wanted to be directing foreign scripts rather than locals ones; if ever pulled up on that in an interview, he would say things like “oh I’d have loved to do an Australian script, we always looked for one” but the fact is that during the 1950s and 1960s, with a few exceptions such as Slaughter of St Teresa’s Day and A Little South of Heaven, he consistently chose to direct foreign scripts until forced to focus on local writing from the mid-sixties onwards (doing a good job on them).
This was entirely typical of the ABC’s television drama directors in the 1950s and 1960s, such as Will Sterling, Pat Barton, Chris Muir, James Upshaw, Eric Tayler, Ray Menmuir and so on; they weren’t anti-Australian writing, they just clearly and consistently preferred foreign scripts on the whole, and we’ve read the internal ABC memos at the NAA which prove that. This attitude shouldn’t be surprising – it’s one that lingers on in many of our state theatre companies today.
Burke’s production of Wuthering Heights starred deejay Lew Luton as Heathcliff, Delia Williams as Cathy, Annette Andre as Isabella, and Richard Davies as Hindley. It was shot in Sydney and was mostly done live with some prerecorded segments.
Andre recalled in an earlier interview that Luton “was strange but we got on well. I remember my hair was very blonde. I’d had to colour it for a TV drama I’d just done in Melbourne. We rehearsed up in Kings Cross – there were ABC rehearsal rooms up there I believe. Lew and I went off for lunch one day just at the time when the police were looking for a man who was attacking and killing women. Lew looked somewhat like him and also, he apparently had a blonde girlfriend. People would look at us when we were walking together and somehow, we came to the attention of the police, because Lew had to be interviewed. It was rather scary, but it all turned out OK. It did make us a bit nervous though for a while.”
Burke later told Graham Shirley in an oral history for the NFSA that the production was “unfortunately a little too large for the conditions… It had rain effects and a lot of that sort of thing, and the rain machine didn’t work, things went wrong like that. But also, I’m not sure the adaptation was terribly good.”
Floor assistant David Twiby confirmed the live broadcast was problematic. “The opening scene was in winter and featured snow around the outside of the house. Later in the production, they went back to the same exterior and it was summer. During the intervening time, we had to remove all the ‘snow’. Not an easy task as the ‘snow’ was actually small pieces of foam and in a studio with ‘live’ microphones we could not use a vacuum cleaner so a dust pan and broom were the order of the day. Despite all our efforts, when the action returned to the outside of the house in the middle of summer, I noticed a pile of ‘snow’ around the window frame that had gone unnoticed.”
Tom Jeffrey, later director of such films as The Odd Angry Shot, was a floor manager on Wuthering Heights. He recalled in an oral history for the NFSA done by Nigel Giles that “Dickie Davies [who played Hindley] had to get out this door and there was a shot of him on one side of the set of him pulling the handle and the next shot was him coming out the door. So what happens [laughs], he goes to open the door, and the door handle comes away, you know, in his hand, he can’t get out the door, but the next shot is there, so he looks at the door handle and sticks it back in and gives it a turn. Meanwhile, I’ve got to the bottom of the door, it was up on a raised-like-three-steps-up-thing, I gave the door an almighty whack from the other side hoping that it would open and fortunately it did. But Dickie said with a bit of surprise ‘ooh’ and the door opened and he went out.”
These things happened on live drama from time to time.
Burke did tell Graham Shirley that Wuthering Heights had “a good cast” and was “nicely designed. A very good interesting set. I think Jack Montgomery was the designer. It had a certain atmosphere but it didn’t work totally, I was not happy with it looking back on it. I can’t think what I would have done differently. Maybe it goes with my misgivings about naturalistic drama. I looked vaguely for symbolism in it and you know, lines like her saying ‘I am Heathcliff’ and I thought, you know, rolls of thunder and things and we might get a nice symbolic level of things, but it didn’t. I think it really died with its leg in the air sadly.”
So basically, Alan Burke pushed to film a local version of a foreign script for no good reason other than he liked Wuthering Heights and wasn’t happy with the end result.
Reviewing the production, the TV critic for The Sydney Morning Herald thought that 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 criticised 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 [author of Cold Comfort Farm] than to Emily Brontë.”
Valda Marshall, the reviewer for the Sydney Sun Herald thought it was “good TV in every respect… cast, acting, camera work and the smooth interpolation of film clips with the actual studio telecast” adding Delia Williams “played the part of the wayward, tempestuous Cathy to perfection” and said Luton was “excellent… although his make up and hairdo was rather unfortunately reminiscent of Marlon Brando’s leather-jacketed cyclist in The Wild One.” She also thought Richard Davies gave “one of the year’s best TV acting jobs.”
“Janus”, the bitchy television reviewer for The Age said that the play was disappointing and “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.”
Neil Hutchison, head of drama at the ABC, called it “a rather uneven production… there were some good things about it, but Heathcliffe as played by Lew Luton was a very pale reflection of what Miss Brontë intended.”
So, basically, reviews were mixed although everyone tipped a bucket on poor old Lew Luton. We’d still love to have seen the production – we’re big fans of Annette Andre and also Delia Williams, who livened up many an early Australian TV drama such as Hamlet and Whiplash. Incidentally, Lew Luton appeared in a few other Australian dramas (including some Whiplash episodes and Alan Seymour’s The Runner) as well as hosting Teen Time and reading the news, then moved to England in 1961, worked there for ten years (sometimes on Australian set TV plays like No Decision and Harp in the South, but also a long stint in the soap Crossroads), returned in 1972 and appeared in various things prior to his death in 2018.
Alan Burke later said that the ratings for Wuthering Heights were tiny but we researched this and discovered that they were weirdly high – a 24% share in Sydney. In Melbourne, it was 14% share, which was more normal for an ABC play. Maybe Sydney was full of Lew Luton fans, who knows.
So, basically the ABC did Wuthering Heights and everyone gave Lew Luton a hard time about it. Jacob Elordi, if you’re reading this, remember that you’re not just walking in the footsteps of Laurence Olivier, Richard Buton, Richard Todd and Cliff Richard, you have to live up to Lew Luton.
The author would like to thank Graham Shirley, Tom Jeffrey, Annette Andre, Nigel Giles. David Twidy and the NFSA for their prior interviews which were used for this article. Unless specified otherwise all opinions are those of the author.
