A Tale of Two Cities

A Tale of Two Cities -- David O. Selznick produced two prestigious Dickens’ adaptations in 1935 – such was the alacrity and self-assurance of the Hollywood film industry’s ancien regime that both massive and elaborate costume dramas, David Copperfield and A Tale of Two Cities could be made in the course of a single year and released back to back. Copperfield was directed by George Cukor and is reputedly subtle and stylish; A Tale, in keeping with its garish subject matter, was made by a hack long since forgotten, but is competently and expensively mounted. David Thomson, who admires A Tale regards the film as primarily a triumph of the studio craft workers – and, indeed, it is easy to see his point. Every shot is beautifully lit and extraordinarily detailed. Three-thousand extras under the brilliant direction of Val Lewton and Jacques Tourneur (as second-unit directors) surge and churn at the foot of a vast set simulating the besieged Bastille. (Lewton and Tourneur’s work is disfigured by unnecessary, blaring titles superimposed over the images in a style derived from silent film practice – this, perhaps, was necessary to conceal the Soviet-influenced montage that the second-unit employs). Crowds of filthy extras riot in the streets while the aristocrats prance about huge palaces. Some of the sets are so gratuitously spectacular that they overwhelm the action – the evil Marquis (impersonated by Basil Rathbone) possesses a chateau that seems to be about twice the size of the Louvre. Selznick has designed the picture to imitate images by Hogarth – the sets swarm with emblematic details and the extras seem to have been selected for noses and profiles that have stepped from the engravings of A Rake’s Progress or The Stages of Cruelty. The slipshod production practices of recent films are put to shame by the pitch-perfect accents sported by the actors performing as denizens of London. Furthermore, the casting is memorably precise and evocative – the characters look exactly as Dickens’ described them and have the appearance of figures from Cruikshank or Phiz, Dickens’ illustrator in the original 1859 version of the novel. The book is crammed with incidents and so is the film – it moves along at a spectacular speed, faithfully illustrating almost all the memorable sequences in the book. The screenwriters dispense with the eerie, and psychologically troubling, Doppelgaenger-plot: Carton bears no resemblance to the totally bland and uninteresting Darney and the plot is adjusted to avoid the narrative-points that rely on the identity of appearance. The screenwriter with great self-assurance, in fact, improve Dickens in this regard and reveals that the likeness between the two characters, although psychologically motivated in the book, is not really necessary for the plot. The subplot involving Jerry Cruncher and a baroque grave-robbing scene is mentioned, but, otherwise, suppressed. Selznick doesn’t want to degrade the prestige of his film by transforming it into a horror picture of the kind popular in that era – although the opening shot of the carriage climbing through the mud of Shooter’s Hill is luridly expressionistic and could be edited into a Universal horror movie without anyone noticing the difference. For some reason, the film doesn’t pack much punch and is curiously uninvolving – after some morbidly fascinating imagery in the first fifteen minutes, a collage of picture and sound that promises great things, the film settles into a series of rather coy tableaux that merely illustrate principal plot points in the novel. There is lots of dialogue and the film has innumerable narrative twists and turns to navigate – much of the picture seems rather tediously dutiful to the text. Ronald Colman is brilliant as Sydney Carton and his performance is indelible, probably because he preserves the core of complete enigma implicit in that character. As the film progresses, it becomes increasingly apparent that the picture belongs to Carton; Lucie and Darnay are mere ciphers. Carton is a puzzling character – a co-star, best friend supporting role that pivots on the actor understanding that his is merely a supporting player who has, somehow, improbably become central to the story. Colman acts effectively in this peculiar part, playing the role of someone who wanted to be the leading man but wasn’t appointed to that part and, therefore, most contrive a tragedy from his squalid existence to justify his involvement in the story at all. The cat fight between the horrific Madame DeFarge and the loyal, horse-faced and officious Miss Pross is a sprawling, writhing spectacle that outdoes the spectacular kitsch in the novel and is worth the price of admission in itself.