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A Tale of Two Cities (Metro-Gold-wyn-Mayer) was David Selznick's last product under his M-G-M contract (others: Dinner at Eight, Viva Villa, Anna Karenina, David Copper field). His difficult task was to deliver a picture that would be a modernized yet authentic version of a story known to every schoolboy, and at the same time one that would keep faith with the historic records of that bloody surge which frothed out of the gutters of Saint Antoine on July 14, 1789, to turn France upside down and change the history of the world.
His tale begins in London, years before the Revolution, with Lucie Manette (Elizabeth Allan) learning that her father has been delivered from political imprisonment, is being sheltered in the home of a French wine-seller named Defarge. In France coach-horses of the Marquis St. Evrémonde trample a child in a tenement street. From these two incidents the Dickens' story builds and broadens until the sound track is eavesdropping on the pulse of a lost century—in France, "the bitter feet of an approaching people"; in England, sanctuary for young Charles Darnay (Donald Woods), nephew of St. Evrémonde. Displeased with Darnay's politics, the Marquis has arranged to have a charge of treason brought against his nephew. Chief witness for the defense is Sydney Carton (Ronald Colman), a brilliant man, but a drunkard, degraded, hopeless, cynical. Saving Darnay from death is the beginning of Carton's regeneration.
Producer Selznick has made one important departure from all previous cinema adaptations of his material. Dickens conceived Darnay and Carton as doubles and in all cinematic presentations of the story, the two roles have been played by one actor. Colman stood out for playing one role, feeling that audience sympathy went to Carton anyway, and that a double was destructive to realism. Similar shrewdness has gone into casting the other roles. No one will soon forget the sultry, pathological hatred of aristocrats which vitalizes the performance of Mme Defarge (Blanche Yurka), bursting into crescendo in the picture's climax when, appealing to the Paris mob and the Revolutionary judges, she has Darnay condemned to the guillotine. Isabel Jewell, as the little seamstress, awaiting execution after Carton has substituted for Darnay in La Force Prison, seeks from Colman one word of explanation for her tragic life.