Aspect Ratio: 1.33:1 Binding: DVD EAN: 0012569793699 Format: Black & White Label: Warner Home Video Manufacturer: Warner Home Video Number Of Items: 1 Publisher: Warner Home Video Region Code: 1 Release Date: 2006-10-10 Running Time: 126 Studio: Warner Home Video Theatrical Release Date: 1935-01-19
Customer Rating: Summary: A marvelous example of David Selznick's way with literature, and why Ronald Colman was a star Comment: A Tale of Two Cities is an outstanding example of a film which in memory seemed great and a classic, but when seen again is just a classic. That's not faint praise, either. Jack Conway may be listed as director, but make no mistake...this is David O. Selznick's film. It carries his strengths with great emotional impact, but it carries Selznick's flaws just as emphatically. Thanks to Charles Dickens, we have a hugely empathetic tale of noble sacrifice and redemption, played out against the extremes of injustice represented by the French Revolution. Thanks to Selznick, that story has been brought to life with cinematic fervor, strong actors, melodramatic situations, vast and detailed settings, and a screenplay which may run for over two hours but which never loses our interest. But Selznick was a man who was convinced that if one blow of the cinematic hammer could drive a nail home, then two or three more would naturally do the job better. And so at regular intervals we have characters, major and minor, over-acting. We are left in absolutely no doubt of the nobility of the noble of the heart; how evil the evil are; how dedicated and chirpy the servants are; or when we should tear up, or smile at amusing antics, or be repulsed by the evil madness of the revolutionaries. Selznick even employs message cards to remind us where we are and what we should be feeling, a technique that went out of fashion with the death of the silent movies.
Still, A Tale of Two Cities is undoubtedly a classic of movie making. Thanks to Dickens and to Ronald Colman as Sydney Carlton, thanks to some vivid casting, thanks to a great mise en scene, as they say, and thanks to Selznick's showmanship and craft, one would have to be a cynic among cynics not to be carried away by Carlton's sadness and his natural nobility. Just as importantly, you'd have to be dead in the heart and head not to be moved by his sacrifice, at how Carlton redeems himself for a friend and the woman they both love. "This I know," he tells Lucie Manette one afternoon. "I would embrace any sacrifice for you and for those dear to you. Will you hold me in your mind as being ardent and sincere in this one thing? Think now and then that there is a man who would give his life to keep a life you love beside you." The courage he gives a young seamstress as they prepare to meet their deaths, the drum roll for the blade to descend, his walk up the stairs to the guillotine, those last words as the camera moves up from the crowds, up past the blade and up to the sunlit clouds...well, I was choking back tears. The ending is melodramatic, flawed for me by a syrupy score and by the over-acting of the young woman playing the seamstress. But, I'll tell you, it works.
It's Sydney Carlton who drives the movie. Without a first-rate actor with whom we can empathize and admire, the part would either be awash in self-pity or simply become tiresome. Ronald Colman may seem a bit old fashioned now. We've come to expect our heros to be much more direct, younger and less idealistically romantic. Colman exuded breeding and intelligence even when he was sword-fighting. He made no enemies of men and he gave women someone to dream about. His portrayal of the dissolute, drunken, self-loathing Carlton never falls into simple sloshing about or petulance. He can see himself with a clear eye and a sense of ironic understanding. He makes Carlton not only a man who has wasted his talents and his life, but a man who we are willing to believe is able to find redemption. That redemption is the unexpected love for Lucie Manette that even extends to deliberately sacrificing of himself to save the man Lucie Manette loves. His love for her is that great.
Selznick peopled his film with vivid caricatures. Some work, some don't. The greasy, revolutionary enthusiasts of the guillotine all begin to look and act alike. The haughty, mannered French aristos are so self-centered we wind up kind of admiring them, and the last scenes showing some of them being noble in the face of the blade is a little phony. Still, Basil Rathbone as the Marquis St. Evremonde wearing a white, powdered wig is a sight to enjoy. His concern for his horses, after they've just run down a peasant boy, is touching. "It's extraordinary to me that you people cannot take care of yourselves and your children," he says, with impeccable Rathbonian diction. "One or the other of you is forever in the way. How do you know what injury you might do to my horses?" And Blanche Yurka as Madame Defarge should make us all extremely wary of women who knit.
A Tale of Two Cities is nothing less than a marvelous, coarsened Selznick "literary" production. It remains an immensely watchable film. If it fails at being "great," it certainly ranks after seventy years as a classic. The DVD transfer looks very good. The extras include a couple of cartoons and a radio adaption of the story.
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