Wuthering Heights 1958 with Richard Burton on TCM

Today, on TCM (US) a quite unique chance to watch the 1958 Wuthering Heights adaptation starring Richard Burton and Rosemary Harris:

Friday, December 6, 20:00 h (ET)
TCM presents: The DuPont Show of the Month: Wuthering Heights (1958)
Director: Daniel Petrie
Writers: James Costigan, based on Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights
Stars: Richard Burton, John Colicos, Patty Duke, Rosemary Harris

The NewYork Times recommends it:

A DuPont Show of the Month in 1958, James Costigan’s adaptation of “Wuthering Heights” has not been seen since the single date it aired: 61 years ago. Daniel Petrie directed this rendition of Emily Brontë’s novel, in which Heathcliff — played by none other than Richard Burton — falls in love with his stepsister Cathy, played by Rosemary Harris. When Cathy instead marries a wealthy man, Heathcliff enacts revenge. Costigan has been “widely praised” for this adaptation, Margalit Fox wrote in The Times. (Mariel Wamsley)

TV Worth Watching gives more information:

It’s a live TV production of Wuthering Heights, first seen on May 9, 1958, as a 90-minute presentation of DuPont Show of the Month. It was first seen then – and last seen then, too. Long presumed lost, this TV incarnation of the Emily Brontë novel, starring Richard Burton and Rosemary Harris, was tracked down recently by Jane Klain, director of research at the Paley Center for Media. Two years ago, her detective work resulted in another TCM premiere of a lost classic: 1966’s The Glass Menagerie, starring Shirley Booth and Hal Holbrook.
TCM showed that one 50 years to the day after its original telecast. Wuthering Heights will be shown on TCM Friday night at 8 p.m. ET, televised for the first time in 61 years – another triumph for what I call, even if they don’t, “Turner Classic Television.”
“It all came from Jane,” Charles Tabesh, senior vice president of programming at TCM, told me Wednesday, laughing. “She knows where a lot of these things are hidden.”
This DuPont show was produced by David Susskind, written by James Costigan (whose later credits include Eleanor and Franklin and F. Scott Fitzgerald and The Last of the Belles), and directed by Daniel Petrie (whose credits, notably, also include Eleanor and Franklin). It stars Richard Burton, five full years before he co-starred with Elizabeth Taylor in Cleopatra, as Heathcliff, and Rosemary Harris, a last-minute substitution for actress Yvonne Furneaux, as Cathy. Cathy as a child, in flashbacks, is played by Patty Duke, four years before she played Helen Keller in the movie version of The Miracle Worker.
Klain explained to me that Rosemary Harris was offered the DuPont Show of the Month role of the adult Cathy at the start, but passed on the opportunity because she already was in rehearsals for another live TV production, the George Schaefer-directed Dial M for Murder). Harris recommended Yvonne Furneaux for the role instead – but when Susskind became so disenchanted with Furneaux, he fired her, so late into production that the “Close-Up” description in that week’s TV Guide still credited her as the leading lady.
Instead, Susskind, according to Klain, went back to Harris, said she was responsible for his current dilemma, and insisted on her playing the part opposite Burton. She did so – even though, in some of the scenes, she kept her script just out of camera view to check on her lines.
Regardless of the behind-the-scenes drama, the on-the-screen drama is something to watch – and this is the first time since the Eisenhower administration to do so.
“We love to do that,” Tabesh said. “To bring back things that even the hard-core people haven’t had a chance to see. They’ve never seen this.” (David Bianculli)