A Tale of Two Cities

A Tale of Two Cities (1935) is an MGM adaptation of Charles Dickens' novel — watch online on iFILM in the version directed by Jack Conway, with Ronald Colman as the dissipated barrister Sidney Carton who becomes the moral centre of the story.

London and Paris on the edge of revolution. Carton is brilliant, sardonic and comprehensively wasted — until he meets Lucie Manette, whose father spent eighteen years locked inside the Bastille. Lucie marries Charles Darnay, a Frenchman of aristocratic blood who is about to discover that birth is a death sentence in revolutionary Paris. Carton watches all of it from the margins, and then makes a choice.

Blanche Yurka's Madame Defarge is the film's most haunting performance — still and implacable, knitting her way through the Revolution without raising her voice once. Colman plays Carton's private exhaustion and buried nobility with a restraint the sound era was still figuring out. Stream A Tale of Two Cities (1935) online on iFILM.