What makes it different from others?

Good start, but then it gets ruined

There is just so much movie here. For some it may be too much. But in the same secretly sarcastic way most telemarketers say the phrase, the title of this one is particularly apt.

The movie turns out to be a little better than the average. Starting from a romantic formula often seen in the cinema, it ends in the most predictable (and somewhat bland) way.

Searching round online a few weeks ago for details about surreal film maker Luis Bunuel's (co)-directing debut L'age d'Or,I was astonished to find out that Bunuel had actually film a near-forgotten adaptation of the Emily Bronte novel Wuthering Heights.With a fellow IMDb'er having told me for months about various adaptations of Bronte's novel (which I've not yet read!) that she has enjoyed,I felt that it was the perfect time to join up with Bunuel,and to enter Bronte's wuthering world for the first time.The plot:Mexico:1800-Returning to Mexico after a number of years,Alejandro decides to pay a visit to the villa where he used to work as a servant for a family.Due to Alejandro having professed his love for the families foster daughter Catalina,the main refuses to allow him in.Not taking no for an answer,Alejandro goes around to the back of the villa and breaks a window in,so that he can finally get a sight of Catalina for the first time in years.Unexpectedly stopped in his tracks,Alejandro is met head on by a towering figure called Eduardo,who along with being the owner of the villa,is also Catalina's husband.Ignoring Eduardo's demands for him to leave,Alejandro rushes to Catalina,who tells Alejandro that she is still passionately in love with him.Delighted at hearing her expression of love Alejandro tells Catalina that she can join him,and that they can run away together.Destroying all of his dreams,Catalina tells Alejandro that despite being deeply in love with him,she is unable to runaway,due to being pregnant with Eduardo's child.Furious at Catalina's 'betrayal',Alejandro decides to get revenge by taking advantage of the mass gambling debt that her brother Ricardo has made,by agreeing to pay off his debt,if Ricardo agrees to sell his ranch and to become Alejandro's servant.As he begins to settle down in Ricardo's ranch,Alejandro notices that Eduardo's sister Isabel appears to be attractive to him.Striking Eduardo and Catalina where he knows it will hurt most,Alejandro quickly gets together with Isabel,and a few days later begins making plans for their marriage.Despite each of them attempting to tear the other one apart,Alejandro and Catalina soon discover that not even death,can fan the flames of their love.View on the film:Whilst the guy is not exactly the first person that comes to mind when I hear the term 'Old Romantic', (with him including some scenes of a butterfly getting killed so that the audience can see what a big softy at heart he is!) the dedication that co-writer/(along with Pierre Unik,Julio Alejandro and Arduino Maiuri) director Luis Bunuel gave to getting his adaptation of Emily Bronte's novel on to the big screen, (Bunuel had been attempting to film the novel since 1931!)shows itself to have been worth all of the effort,thanks to Bunuel perfectly balancing Bronte's tornado Romance with a chillingly mysterious,shadow socked Gothic Horror atmosphere.Backed by Raul Lavista's stirring score,Bunuel reveals his doom-laden world by having raindrops scatter across the screen as the thunder in in the background matches Alejandro harsh knocks at the villa's door.Along with the scattering rain,Bunuel also allows shadows to gradually cover the character's faces,which along with giving the title a strong Gothic Horror bite,also perfectly shows the brutal,horror monster like attitude that all of the character's have for each other,with Bunuel displaying the characters lust for power to be something that is covered in doom which blocks anyone from seeing the deadly path that they are unknowingly on.Giving the movie a vicious swipe of Bronte's Romance,Bunuel brilliantly combines his Gothic Horror atmosphere with a strikingly stylized tornado romance,as Bunuel shows in chilling clarity the distance that Alejandro and Catalina will go in order to archive their ever last romance,with the grim,oddly romantic final moments being enclosed around a Gothic Horror shine which Catalina and Alejandro finds they are unable to break out of,even in death.Despite only being placed in the movie due to producer Oscar Danciger being desperate to end their contracts after a planned Musical Comedy of his had failed to enter production, (which would lead to Bunuel moaning about how none of them were any good) each of the actors give superb performances,with Irasema Dilian and Jorge Mistral each bringing contrasting elements to Alejandro and Catalina doomed romance,thanks to Mistral showing Alejandro's lone cry desperation to strike Catalina where it hurts,whilst the very pretty Dilian shows that Catalina is prepared to strike back,but has to pull her punches due to the conflicting feeling that she shares for Alejandro and Eduardo.Joining Dilian and Mistral,Ernesto Alonso gives a delightfully curled lip performance as the out of his dept Eduardo,whilst Luis Aceves Castaneda gives a charmingly bonkers performance as the half craze Ricardo.Avoiding the risk of the movies edges being worn down by the 24 years that it took to get made,the writers give their adaptation a deliciously spiky quality,by showing all out the character's being unwilling to compromise their desires,which along with giving each of them a grotesque edge,also allows the writers to use Alejandro and Catalina's failure to compromise as a method to give the title a tragic,romantic tap.Placing Alejandro and Catalina's relationship at the centre,the writers brilliantly take a reverse psychologically route in Alejandro attack's by showing each of Alejandro vicious strikes to be something that digs deeper into his and Catalina's veins,as Alejandro and Catalina begin to discover how turbulent their wuthering relationship has become.

I'm forever a William Wyler fan. Yet must agree that he had a peculiar take on this Bronte classic. For one thing Cathy is far from a typecast Hollywood heroine. The love affair of Heathcliffe and Catherine demanded better than Merle Oberon, IMHO. This Mexican production directed by the legendary Luis Bunuel has a far lovelier girl in Cathy's role. Irasema Dilian underplays Cathy with listless gravity that ideally serves her sexual attraction.It's plainly what this brilliant director took from Emily Bronte's own Gothic palette. Spoilers near: Just look at this creature so hysterical about Heathcliffe *here Alejandro* as to die for love of him. Irasema was likely directed to taunt her weak husband openly, displaying her passion for Alejandro. Dilian is poker-faced throughout, yet ravishing to look at. Just as the great novel paints her. Bunuel features the unlucky spouse as just a poor cuckold and nothing more.As for Jorge Mistral; he was a top-notch matinée idol in Mexico, with nothing to ask of anybody in Wyler's film, not even Olivier. Of medium stature with virile good looks, he recalls Jeff Chandler to me. Not a bad Alejandro (Heathcliffe.) Mistral's brooding portrayal of Bronte's anti-hero is very persuasive. It's quite clear Luis Bunuel knew what he wanted for this important part. The other actors take some warming up to; but no more than those in Wyler's Wuthering Heights. Willy Wyler wasn't crazy about Laurence Olivier as Heathcliffe, bawling him out mercilessly on set. So also David Niven as Cathy's brother; --Wyler laughed to his face saying: "Look at him! An actor who can't ACT!" Of course that role was tripe, just as in this Spanish-spoken script. In Bunuel's version, the settings are bright, hardly dismal. Yet photographer Agustin Jimenez caught them as sober and forbidding enough. Playing an orchestral Love/Death sequence of Wagner's Tristan and Isolde at intervals of unpleasant stress for the lovers didn't seem very Gothic at all, unfortunately. It came together smartly, however. As a romance too obsessive not to end in tragedy. Excellent contrast to the Hollywood rendition in which Heathcliffe and Cathy ended up embracing amidst towering clouds, like angelic beings. Luis Bunuel's version is superior. I suspect Emily Bronte would have preferred it.

The key distinction, I think between Bronte's "Wuthering Heights" and Bunuel's is his more psychological/surreal framework. Although both present a heroine who is insistently independent, special, and almost emotionally omnipotent, Catalina is more contracted from the world and its influences than is Catherine. Bunuel begins in medio with Alehandro's return, and ends with his murder, an invented climax that considerably heightens the romance and condenses plot and characters. From a more expressionistic setting emerge more deeply discontinuous characters that seem fated by some universal imperative. The adults are repressive, the youthful repressed. There is no room in this cruel worldview for passion, let alone a burning love. And the only beauty resides in some other dimension--which must begin with death, an existence elsewhere, toward which both Catalina and Alehandro are almost compelled--by the depth of their consciousness--to pursue.Bunuel links sex and death as Catalina and Alehandro are literally buried in the same coffin, the path of reason and survival refused for a momentary connection or the chance of some profound existence--the big heat of the finale literally eclipsing all other characters and the whole world of logic--Ricardo a mere instrument of their self-immolation. Their end, their madness is dramatic and glorious, as if a victory over the sources of repression and mere survival. And Bunuel's admiration falls in with their passionate embrace.Bronte's Catherine story is longer, offering her more space, more history, and more meaning---which lives on and changes through the lives of others after her death. In her novel, there is a greater demarcation between adults and youth. Adults are the oppressors, while children and adolescents are the oppressed and the rebels. Catherine uncompromisingly embraces these two roles--almost eternalizing them, and thus giving herself no options for maturation into adulthood. She is the willful child who finds adults a despicable lot, the division between herself and them inevitable. But Bronte offers a degree of context to this: the early death of Catherine's parents, and Heathcliff's oppressed outsider status, for example. Nonetheless, none of the adults in the novel break the cold mold she has set for them. And Catherine's fiery nature sets her on a path toward death.Heathcliff is almost an invention of her passionate mind, a mind which is as about as unoriginal as she thinks it original. Not only is she into love sop, but into the masculinized, heroic male against which Edward is puny, virtuous, and spiritless. (Alehandro is the kind of male Bunuel favors, whether invented or real) Nonetheless, Catherine finds a way to reign in his power by imagining and encouraging him to be under her sway. (a conformity hard to believe especially in the Bunuel version) "He's more myself than I" she says, as her internal isolation begins to be more than a match for her external isolation. And as her fictive powers grow more potent, her mind is more jeopardized until the enormity of the mirror scene which leaves her with a sense of being totally alone--and mad.But if Bunuel glorifies his heroine and hero, Bronte seems more guarded. Yes, Catherine and Heathcliff are superior and romantic, but life goes on without them, and perhaps a more promising life. For Catherine's daughter and her brother's son, who alone remain after the deaths of Edward, Heathcliff, Hindley and Linton, seem to be entering a bigger, more realistic world which promises a softening of the self-destructive impulse that characterized their parents lives.

Abismos de pasión (1954) is Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights, directed and co-scripted by Luis Buñuel.This film was produced in Mexico, where Buñuel lived for 20 years as an exile from Franco's Spain. Believe it or not, the film works. Colonial Mexico in 1800 probably had many similarities to the rigid, socially conscious society of England at the same period. Buñuel's film is set in rural Mexico, in an region as isolated as the English moors.Jorge Mistral plays Alejandro (Heathcliff), Irasema Dilián plays Catalina (Catherine), and Ernesto Alonso is Eduardo (Edgar). These actors were apparently popular Mexican stars of the time, and they play their roles with a ferocious intensity that fits Brontë's writing style. The whole effort has an over-the-top quality to it, but, when you think about it, so does Wuthering Heights. Abismos de pasión isn't a film for everyone, but it's a must for Buñuel buffs.