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A Tale of Two Cities cost an even million dollars. Acknowledging in a formal "bibliography" on the screen its debt to Carlyle and other authorities on the period, it goes far beyond the limitations of the Dickens story. Director Jack Conway, whom Selznick says he chose because Conway is "a master of melodrama, and a big, good-natured, sentimental Irishman," has photographed the storming of the Bastille as if it happened yesterday afternoon. The whole picture constitutes a record of one of history's most melodramatic moments told in an idiom equal to its subject, from a skeleton designed by a novelist of genius. Like all real art, it achieves the general by relating the particular with an emotional intensity that never lets down from the first shot of a coach wheel being pulled through the mud of an English road to the last shot, in which the camera swings up from the dying Carton and the bloodthirsty crowd in the Place dé la Révolution, up the shaft of the guillotine and still up, into the sunny sky of a new France.