Review of A Tale of Two Cities

"A Tale of Two Cities" (1935) was directed by Jack Conway and Robert Z. Leonard, uncredited, from a novel by Charles Dickens. The script had several other sources, but is credited to S.N. Behrman and W. P. Lipscomb. These details become important to note when the virtues and much more minor flaws of an exciting but not quite first-rank novel by a famous writer are compared to the virtues and minor flaws of the movie based upon them. The novel is very faithful, I suggest, in many respects to the novel. Dolly Tree is given credit for the fine costumes in this expensive David O. Selznick production. Others deserving praise for an unusually faithful early historical costume production include its original music's composer Herbert Stothart, cinematographer Oliver T. Marsh, legendary Art Director Cedric Gibbons, Second Unit Director/Assistant Director Jacques Tourneur working with Val Lewton), and Art Department associates Fredric Hope and Edwin B. Willis. The film is occasionally very moving and exciting, but aside from the French Revolution action sequences, the film is a well-acted period drama. So, it is the actors in this film upon whom the viewer needs to focus; it is they who carry the meaning of this novel of human values and relationships forward or fail to carry it. In this regard, anyone who evaluates this film needs to note good professional work by Elizabeth Allan as Lucie Manette, Henry B. Walthall and H.B. Warner as her father and Gabelle, Donald Woods as Charles Darnay, Blanche Yurka and Mitchell Lewis as the de Farges. Even better work is done in this movie by Basil Rathbone as the Marquis St. Evremonde, Walter Catlett as Barsad, Edna May Oliver as Miss Pross, Reginald Owen as Stryver, Isabel Jewell as the seamstress and Ronald Colman as Sydney Carton. Colman gives a very intelligent, restrained and effective performance as the hard-drinking Carton, obviously award level. The best sequences in the scenario by my lights include the passage of cavalry that kill a child, the revolutionary courtroom scene, the trial in a court headed by E.E. Clive, several tavern and restaurant scenes involving Colman in various stages of bitter humor, the elaborate storming of the Bastille and the general impeccable handling of stagecoaches and interior scenes and the final beautifully-done execution scene. There are some flaws in the film, minor ones I suggest, which I assert are due to Charles' Dicken's choices in the matter of character. But we see meaningful characters developed in this very early film that are beyond the capacity of most filmmakers of the period. Characters talk, act, react, have station and status and purposes, social positions and responsibilities. It is in the elaboration of these intertwined lives lived in the shadow of the Revolution being fomented in France that the persons in the film are painted; and I suggest it is from those events that they draw some of their power by Dickens's work; and also it is in their entrapment in social levels, with only a vague democratic altruistic-sentimental humanism as one choice and an equally vague republican statist-emotionless elitism as the other choice, that they lose the chance to become as great to their appreciators as they might have been if given a broader non-imperial British canvas--one containing individual rights--against which to be portrayed.