Cathy's cheat sheet

The New Yorker tells the fascinating story of how Wuthering Heights 1958 came to be found.

When I last caught up with Jane Klain, the tireless research manager at the Paley Center for Media, on West Fifty-second Street, she had unearthed a long-lost television version of “The Glass Menagerie,” which had aired in 1966 and then vanished for half a century. Klain has a knack for these kinds of quests: she spends years, sometimes decades (on and off), tracking down treasures of lost classic television. [...]
Not long ago, Klain sent me a somewhat cryptic e-mail. “I have just discovered a ‘lost’ TV classic that hasn’t been seen by anyone since 1958,” she wrote, adding, “More importantly, I set out to find it almost twenty years ago because a Broadway actress had a fascinating backstory about the show.” A live one!
Here goes: In 1999, Klain was at the Cannes Film Festival—her then-husband worked at Miramax—waiting on the buffet line at a tented luncheon on the beach. There she spotted Rosemary Harris, the legendary English actress and nine-time Tony Award nominee. (Younger audiences may know her as Aunt May from the Tobey Maguire “Spider-Man” movies.) “I went over to her and I told her how much I admire her, and blah blah blah,” Klain recalled recently, in her cluttered office at the Paley Center. Harris told her about a broadcast that she had always wanted to track down: a 1958 televised adaptation of “Wuthering Heights,” in which Harris played Cathy opposite Richard Burton as Heathcliff. It had aired on CBS, as part of the series “DuPont Show of the Month,” and then been sucked into a black hole. [...]
An eleven-year-old Patty Duke played the young Cathy. The show was broadcast from a studio in Brooklyn and received mixed reviews. In the Times, Jack Gould wrote that Emily Brontë’s novel “perhaps is too formidable a work to compress into twenty-one inches in a single evening’s sitting,” although he praised Harris for achieving “moments of tenderness.”
One thing haunted Harris, however. In her rush to learn the part, she had been a bit shaky on the lines for her deathbed scene and had been sneaking glances at the script between shots. “I remember lying in bed and seeing these huge cameras lumbering toward me and Richard appearing and thinking, I don’t know what I say!” Harris recalled with a chuckle. “I had to read it very quickly and then stuff it under the pillow just before he took me in his arms, saying, ‘Cathy, Cathy, don’t die!’ ” She had always wondered: Had the camera caught her stuffing her cheat sheet under the pillow?
Cut back to 1999, at Cannes, where Harris told this story to Klain and asked if she could look for the kinescope (a film-reel recording of a TV show). Klain told me, “I said, ‘Yes, of course. I’m a very good detective. I’ll find it.’ And I tried for twenty years.” She looked in all the usual places: the Library of Congress, U.C.L.A.’s Film & Television Archive. She even checked the Hagley Museum and Library, in Wilmington, Delaware, which houses an archive of business history, including records from DuPont. Nada. Then, this past spring, she ran into Harris once again, at an after-party for the Theatre World Awards. (Harris was playing Mrs. Higgins in the Broadway revival of “My Fair Lady.”) “I wanted to tell you I have failed,” Klain recalled telling her, to which Harris replied, “Well, that’s O.K., but do keep trying.”
Then, a breakthrough: a few weeks earlier, Klain’s friend David Schwartz, the in-house historian at the Game Show Network, had sent Klain an e-mail. The archives of the late television historian J. Fred MacDonald had just been acquired by the Library of Congress, and Schwartz thought that she might be interested in seeing the inventory. She looked, and—eureka!—there was “Wuthering Heights,” with the note “Only kinescope made of this show.” The archive hadn’t yet been incorporated into the library’s collections, but Klain had a contact there, and she had a digital copy made. She watched it at her desk. “I thought it was very steamy,” she said.She mailed a copy to Harris, who watched it at home and was relieved that her death scene did not reveal any script shenanigans. “It was sort of surreal,” Harris said, of watching her younger self. A tech guy was with her in North Carolina, helping with the remote control. “He couldn’t believe what he was seeing,” she told me. “He said, ‘That’s you?’ I said, ‘I suppose it is.’ He went away very bemused.” One scene, in which Cathy wanders the moors, reminded her that the set had been festooned with pink plastic crocuses, one of which she kept for years as a memento. And she had fond memories of Burton. “He was a lovely person,” she said. “I got to know them both when he and Elizabeth were married. Oh, well. All a long time ago, and everybody’s gone.” (Actually, that isn’t quite true. Furneaux is ninety-one and apparently living in Switzerland. And Michel de Carvalho, the child actor who played the young Heathcliff, went on to appear in “Lawrence of Arabia,” compete as an Olympic skier and luger, and marry into the multi-billion-dollar Heineken fortune.) (Michael Schulman)

The Christian Science Monitor selects the best fiction books of 2019, including

The Unlikely Escape of Uriah Heep by H.G. Parry
A lawyer is saddled with bailing out his younger brother, a professor who brings to life characters from books by famed authors such as Dickens, Wilde, Austen, and Brontë. When a stranger with a similar gift threatens everything, wild adventures ensue in this imaginative and heartfelt novel.

National Review features Céline Sciamma's film Portrait de la jeune fille en feu.

Sciamma’s 19th-century story ventures into what we think of as the literary past  —The Brontës, Stendhal and, of course, Henry James — for a love story that fashionably goes against convention. [...]
This self-conscious approach to “queerness” embarrasses Sciamma’s talent for expressing emotional complexity, as her mentor André Téchiné did in the superb Being 17. Portrait of a Lady on Fire — a bold title fusing Henry James’s psychological acuity to Alicia Keys’s pop audacity — should have been as sensually powerful as Truffaut’s Brontë-esque films The Story of Adèle H. and Two English Girls, while cinematographer Claire Mathon also evokes the neoclassical palette of Rohmer’s The Marquise of O. Instead, it’s as sentimental and predictable as Carol. (A male heterosexual filmmaker who excluded women would be shamed out of the canon.) (Armond White)

Here's how Spring Hill Insider ends a review of the movie Fifty Shades Darker.

After one round of carnal pleasure, Christian asks Ana why she waited until 21 to lose her virginity to him. Her answer is that she was looking for someone “exceptional” who could measure up to the kind of men Jane Austen and Charlotte Brontë wrote about.
She can do better, and really, so can we.

Philippine Daily Inquirer features the play A(Flame).

At the University of the Philippines (UP) Diliman, there was a thesis production by two Theater Arts students, Criz Dizon and Rainbow Gutierrez. The play, “A(Flame),” had a rather complex genealogy—a collaborative devised effort (though principally authored by Alexandra May Cardoso) based on the Jean Rhys novel “Wide Sargasso Sea,” itself a sort of prequel to Charlotte Brontë’s “Jane Eyre.”
With all that, one could expect a rich theatrical experience—and it was. Familiarity with either or both novels would have contributed to a fuller appreciation of the play, especially since its development hinged on the fragmented memories and fantasies of a madwoman.
With only hazy recollections from college of the Brontë novel, this reviewer depended on the program notes to supplement what could be grasped from the dialogue, which was not always an easy exercise, but proved to be a rewarding one.
The play, directed by Marjay Manalastas, was simultaneously a woman’s personal tragedy, a harrowing evocation of mental illness, and a meditation on cross-cultural and gender disparities—a potent brew brought to life by the performances.
Dizon was poignant as the demented Antoinette/Bertha, while Gutierrez was versatile in multiple roles as the warden Grace Poole, the specter cum nurse from the past Christophine, and an indefinable monstrous “creature,” perhaps the embodiment of insanity.
The staging was striking, a Gothic atmosphere wreathed in cobwebs that evoked the protagonist’s world of intertwined past adversity and present dementia—a world of pain at once hallucinatory and all too real. (Arturo Hilado)