‘Wuthering Heights’: They’re hot but not passionate

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‘Wuthering Heights’: A Victorian novel with a name (and plot points) fit for a 1980s prime-time soap. It’s one of those titles that rattles around in your head even before you’ve ever read the book or the Cliffs Notes, or seen it adapted for TV or the movies, which it has been at least once a decade since 1920, not even counting foreign-language films or the 2003 MTV musical update.

Not all of those versions have made it to America, to be sure, but Sunday night brings the latest “Masterpiece” incarnation, only 11 years after the last one. (It was ‘Masterpiece Theatre’ then, of course.)

Given its thoroughgoing tempestuousness, it’s no surprise that Emily Brontë’s novel of everlasting love denied -- and yet, in its way, fulfilled -- is catnip to producers and actors alike. Along with the heavy breathing, it has the appointments of a fairy tale (dark child reduced to servitude by evil foster brother) and of a ghost story (lonely, isolated house, dug-up grave, possible actual ghosts). And yet it is a difficult story to make well, because its hero, Heathcliff, is also such a villain -- at the very least a pain in the neck -- as he prosecutes a permanent war of revenge against everyone who kept him down or apart from his foster sister, Cathy. (And she can be a bit of a pill herself.)

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Photo credit: PBS