Love is complicated and we all know this. It seems that it gets more complicated with time and is harder to figure out. We all hope and have faith that one day we will meet our one true love, and sometimes we do, and sometimes we do not. There is also the case when our love is taken away from us. Some of us are lucky enough to meet this person when we are young and grow to love him or her even more like Heathcliff (Rex Downing/Laurence Olivier) and Catherine (Sarita Wooten/Merle Oberon) in William Wyler's 1939 film version of Emily Brontë's 1847 Wuthering Heights.
It goes along with the idea that we do not always get what and whom we want no matter what. In most modern movies, the "good guy" gets the girl; and the movie is over; but in classic movies one can never tell what is going to happen; and this is what makes it beautiful and entertaining.
Wuthering Heights, with the thwarted love of Heathcliff and Cathy, who married the rich Edgar Linton (David Niven) reminded me of Casablanca, directed in 1942 by Michael Curtiz, because of the unrequited love factor, when Ilsa (Ingrid Bergman) goes off with her freedom fighter husband, Victor Lazlo (Paul Henreid), instead of her beloved Rick (Humphrey Bogart). As Charlie Brown once said, "Nothing takes the taste out of peanut butter like unrequited love."
We would all like to think that our lives would end in a happy ending, but who really knows? I believe that in American society we are so scared of being alone that we just marry without really realizing that this is supposed to be a life-long commitment. The final shot of Heathcliff's and Catherine's ghosts walking off together happily gave me closure, and by the end I was like whew. I think both characters needed to grow up and realize what both of them meant to each other. Heathcliff needed to get over his past, and Catherine needed to quit being so snooty, but both of them did not realize what they had until they saw that
they were not going to be together in life, as often happens in real life.