“What do they know of heaven or hell who know nothing of life,” cries Heathcliff at Cathy’s bedside in Wuthering Heights. The dying Charles Foster Kane mutters only the famous one word, “Rosebud,” in Citizen Kane. Made only two years apart, in 1939 and 1941 at the pinnacle of Hollywood’s golden age, both films are hauntingly defined not only by memorable lines but by the epoch-making photography of Gregg Toland. His arresting use of deep focus created a new dimension in these two films.
Toland’s camera work circumvented the limitations of the spoken word, presenting new cinematic visions that disturbingly illustrated how man does not always have access to the inner workings of his own soul. The moors in Wuthering Heights are not geographic locations but exist in a strange metaphysical netherworld of Emily Brontë’s wondrous imagination. Citizen Kane’s Xanadu is not a huge mansion but a sepulcher of Kane’s spiritual self-immolation—or perhaps just a final contemptuousness for the living world. Toland’s photography explores the psychological kinship between word and image and unites these two extremely dissimilar films. Art is a mystery that cannot be put into words, but just as unfathomable is how two such eloquent movies could have emerged from such a quintessentially commercial medium as motion pictures.
By 1939 critics were beginning to take American films seriously as an art form rivaling theater. New York Critics Circle named Wuthering Heights the best film of 1939 over Gone With the Wind, claiming that recent films at least equaled the best of Broadway. Citizen Kane would later achieve greater prestige as the century’s greatest film, although director Orson Welles had never made a movie before.
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Citizen Kane is a tricky harbinger and remains a tantalizing mixture of cinematic styles, a compromise between old Hollywood and what would become film noir. Wuthering Heights was written by Charles MacArthur and Ben Hecht, who were prestigious enough to peddle their superb screenplay to the highest bidder. Samuel Goldwyn purchased it at the request of his great director William Wyler. Yet the film today does not retain acclaim similar to Welles’ project. Everyone calls Wuthering Heights a great film but none seems to discuss the why of it. The haunting metaphysics of Brontë’s fatalistic poetry seems to some as buried in curious irony from a different universe.
Toland did more than add dimension to the screenplay. His camera seeps into corners of the very DNA of the dialogue and manipulates and insinuates a resonance beyond the words themselves. “Susan, don’t leave me,” cries Kane, but as he walks out of her demolished bedroom, a series of multiple reflections in the hallway magnify his aloneness. “Oh why did God give me life, what is it but hunger and pain,” cries Heathcliff to his pleading wife, who does not have the smell of heather in her hair, but suddenly Toland moves his face away from light to darkness soon to be followed by the announcement of Cathy’s impending death. He will lose the smell of heather forever. By now the interiors of Wuthering Heights have taken on shabbiness whereas the grandeur of Xanadu is so complex that the interiors fade into indistinguishable darkness. Kane makes no dramatic pronouncements, yet the bizarre shots of the opera sequence become inevitable harbingers of Kane’s inner loneliness. Heathcliff curses Cathy and will not let her die. She must haunt him forever. When Heathcliff carries Cathy to the window for the last time, Merle Oberon inadvertently moves her mouth uncannily like the actress who portrayed her character as a child.
In Citizen Kane, Toland gradually alters the composition of the photography, insinuating a strange transition from black-and-white contrast to shadowy, indistinct shadings as in Kane’s melancholic feelings of dissolution; in Wuthering Heights the color palette suggests grey encroaching decay. Both Kane and Heathcliff are resigned to sorrow beyond their cognition. Heathcliff rages; Kane remains silent; both have a motivating childhood that determines their fate. Kane is happy with the $50 million he received on coming of age. The film implies that childhood loss is not an issue for him. It’s only a sled. But Heathcliff’s torment goes beyond mourning for Cathy. Toland’s shimmering creation of Penistone Crag is lost forever, and Heathcliff’s loss of his childhood romps on the moors with Cathy will forever simmer in his soul.
Toland created the yin and yang, which unite the mystic tragedy of these very dissimilar films; the mystery of man’s inability to perceive his inner anguish lingers in the physical construction of the movies. Toland’s camera suggested worlds wherein the photographic image can ironically surpass what we see on the screen.
