The Best A Tale of Two Cities Movie Adaptation, Compared

Ask which version to watch and the answer has been the same for decades, which is unusual for a novel this often filmed. The interesting part is why one performance from the 1930s keeps winning an argument against everything made since, and what the competing version did differently on purpose. If you would rather be inside the story than watching it, the playable A Tale of Two Cities opens on the same scenes every director has to stage.

🎞️ The 1935 picture, and the performance people cite

Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer released it in December 1935 with Ronald Colman as Sydney Carton, and the reviews were immediate. Andre Sennwald filed for The New York Times on 26 December 1935 that Colman “gives his ablest performance in years as Sydney Carton” and predicted the picture would cause a rearranging of ten-best lists.

What did not follow was an acting nomination. The Academy’s own database shows the film taking exactly two nominations at the 9th Academy Awards — Outstanding Production for MGM and Film Editing — while the Actor category that year went to Paul Muni over Gary Cooper, Walter Huston, William Powell and Spencer Tracy. Colman is not on the list anywhere. Readers who bring up his Carton today almost always bring up the omission in the same breath, which is its own kind of evidence about how the performance landed.

🎩 The 1958 film, in deliberate black and white

The Rank Organisation’s version arrived in 1958 with Dirk Bogarde as Carton and Dorothy Tutin as Lucie Manette, directed by Ralph Thomas, and its most revealing production decision was about colour. Thomas refused it. The novel, he said, “was written in black and white, and it’s got to be made in black and white”, which in 1958 was a choice a British studio had to justify rather than a default.

Its screenwriter, T. E. B. Clarke, made a second structural decision that is easy to miss and changes everything downstream: he compressed the story’s span to three years. Dickens runs his plot across roughly two decades, so the compression tightens the thriller and flattens the long slow accumulation of grievance that the middle Books are actually about. The reviews caught the effect without naming the cause, ranging from Variety’s “good adventure yarn” to the Monthly Film Bulletin’s “eminently respectable but scarcely distinguished”.

The Garret Prisoner is a doorway in the playable A Tale of Two Cities: you are in the room above the wine-shop with the man who has forgotten his own name, and you can coax him, wait him out, or say the name and see what happens. Role-play A Tale of Two Cities →

🎭 The stage Carton that came first

Cinema inherited this story from the theatre, and the theatre had been running it hard for half a century before the cameras arrived. The photograph at the top of this page is one piece of the evidence: Tyrone Power Snr., father of the film star of the same name, in costume as Sidney Carton, photographed in Adelaide around the turn of the twentieth century and held by the State Library of New South Wales.

That lineage explains a lot about how the story photographs. Stage productions had already decided which scenes the audience came for, and the films took the list over more or less intact: the mail coach, the garret, the trial, the wine-shop, the street. It also explains the acting register. Colman is playing a part that had been a touring star’s calling card for two generations, and the weariness he brings to it reads as a deliberate correction to that inheritance.

🧩 The three problems every version has to solve

Whatever the budget, the same three obstacles come up, and how a director handles them tells you more than a star name does.

The first is the doubling. Two men have to look enough alike to fool a courtroom, and the novel stages that with a barrister being asked to remove his wig so the jury can compare faces (l.588–594). Casting one actor in both parts makes the resemblance total and the acting impossible; casting two makes the acting easy and the resemblance a matter of faith.

The second is the garret. Doctor Manette spends his introduction making shoes and answering to a cell number, “One Hundred and Five, North Tower” (l.331), and the scene is almost entirely internal. Every screen version keeps it anyway, because without it the second half has no foundation to stand on.

The third is the crowd. Saint Antoine has to be a place with a temperature rather than a set full of extras, and this is where budget shows most plainly. Readers arguing about which adaptation is best are usually, underneath, arguing about which one made the street feel inhabited. The novel itself is free at Project Gutenberg if you want to check what the camera left out.