-Devdutt Trivedi
Jack Conway’s highly successful adaptation of Dickens’ classic text transposes the author’s descriptive, character driven style, to the event based logic of the Hollywood narrative. The film, which was nominated for two Oscars in 1936 for Best Film Editing and Best Picture, seems to adapt Pudovkin’s technique, of basing successions of images (in Pudovkin’s case, to produce the effect of montage) on subjective selections of content decided upon by the director, to the medium of the Victorian novel. Whereas Pudovkin’s own masterful adaptation of Gorky’s Mother, Mat (1926) transposes the narrative to the suggestive, rhythmic formations of montage, Conway’s adaptation is much more a selection of certain events in the novel so as to base the narrative on forwarding of events instead of character studies as in Dickens’ original.
Conway’s adaptation begins on the day before the French Revolution, when Madame Lucie Manette discovers her now psychic father Dr. Alexandre Manette is trapped in prison where he has been forced to become a cobbler. While traveling across the English Channel, Lucie meets Charles Darnay, who unlike his harsh uncle, Dr. Marquis De Evermond, is sympathetic to the struggle of the workers against the domineering Parisian bourgeoisie. The turning point of the film is a role reversal, between two of the several protagonists in the novel set at the time of the French revolution, where the retired British barrister Sydney Carton sacrifices himself in place of Charles Darnay for the sake of his beloved Lucie, so that she can be with Darnay. MGM’s adaptation of the novel is very much a studio created product with sets and props used to recreate Dickens’ studied interiority. This use of interiority captures Dickens approach to his favourite oppositions of darkness and light, good versus evil and rich versus poor that are unveiled in a grid like manner through Conway’s constructed mise en scene. The film follows after the success of George Cuckor’s adaptation of Dickens’ David Copperfield titled The Personal History, Adventures, Experience, & Observation of David Copperfield the Younger (1935).
Dickens’ sympathy for the working class is derived from his own humiliating experiences at being a worker in a factory. All his hero driven masterpieces from David Copperfield to Nicholas Nikleby are autobiographical in the sense that they, having been exploited like Dickens as members of the working class, until they eventually rise to the upper class. Dickens’ inimitable style, for it is a style and not comments interrupting a skillfully forwarded narrative, combines character description through, as analyzed by the Russian master Sergei Eisenstein, an interest in geometrical divisions of space through evolving his characters and writing form from the style of the great French masters, Gustave Flaubert and Honore De Balzac. His discourse on class, on the tricky situations that arise between upper class characters and the inhumane conditions of the working class characters, are a step towards the mechanical construction of relativistic discourse in the works of Franz Kafka, which are also a meditation of strangeness through the concept of the situation and its relationship with class. A Tale of Two Cities, completed in 1859, is probably his most uncharacteristic novel in the sense that it is completely stripped of Dickens’ trademark humour that halts the flowing out of a situation, to instead play out only the details in the construction of events.
Although the book has been described as the least Dickensian of all novels with its lack of attention to ‘the proliferation of unnecessary detail’ which George Orwell identified as the trademark of Dickensian writing, it does bring about the trademark split between
narration and character development that form the backbone of his best work. The idea occurred to Dickens when he was working on Wilkie Collins’ play The Frozen Deep, to write a novel which would be ‘a drama of resurrection and renunciation.’ The play in itself was Dickensian and the themes of a triangular love story between Lucie, Charles Darnay and Sydney Carlton, as well as the theme of the return of the parent which form the backbone of perhaps Dickens’ most superior work, Great Expectations (1861).
The idea of writing a novel on the French revolution had occurred to Dickens since he met Thomas Carlyle whose novels, Chartism and The French Revolution had influenced Dickens while composing Barnaby Rudge (1840). According to George Woodcock, Dickens had already referred to the writings of Rousseau, Mercier’s Tableau De Paris and earlier English novels on the French revolution such as Anthony Trollope’s La Vendee. Unlike the film, the book suggests the presence of a revolution and does not depict scenes at the location of the guillotine. In this way Dickens avoids representing events to instead make subjective character studies to analyze the difference between the characters. The characters and their utterances form the body of ‘unnecessary detail’ that ornaments the surface of the milieu so as to create static objects instead of producing an imitation of reality or a stylized realism.
Dickens published the last portion of A Tale of Two Cities on 26th November, 1859 and its narrative superiority is denoted by Woodcock who believed that ‘the novel, considered as a story, is generally and justly thought to be the best he wrote.’ Dickens attempted to write characters ‘whom the story shall express more than they should express themselves by dialogue.’ The crystallization of character in the case of Dickens arises from experience: from his lonely childhood, his father’s detention for debt (another theme in Dickens’ novels) in the Marshalsea prison, his experiences in the workplace to function as raw material for painting the working class and his experiences in Rome in 1845 where he was sickened by the presence of the crowd around the guillotine. According to Woodcock, this crystallization of the character comes from the reaction to unmediated experience, in Dickens’ case, the anger of the child. Woodcock reads Dickens portrayals as a sudden release of repressed rage, most obviously seen at a personal level in Oliver Twist. A Tale of Two Cities best transposes this personal space to a political sphere around the theme of resurrection. Dickens, in the text, shows a restraint in his descriptions of the hanging sequences at the mercy of ‘Madame Guillotine,’ a detail absent in the film. The film dramatizes Dickens’ restraint to create instead a uni-dimensional Hollywood drama that is more a story around the French revolution than a commentary on Dickens’ literary object.
The issue of whether Dickens supported the Right or Left is still open to debate, with the cliché being that he is portraying a world that underlines the stupidity of the world. If this is the case then A Tale of Two Cities is the best example of this balance between radical and conservative. However, Leftists have either, like both Marx and Engels, respected Dickens’ work or like Orwell believed that Dickens was being critical of the revolution, and for him ‘revolution is a monster.’ Although the Bastille scenes (directed by Val Lewton and Jacques Tourner who would go onto make those RKO B-horror classics) are brought out with great gusto in the 1935 adaptation, the lack of any political ideology fails to link the important work with contemporary settings with reference to either the First World War or the American Great Depression of 1929. In this way the film is
trapped in a technique that has become commonplace today: where the reality of violence and its affected ideology are replaced by seamless storytelling shot within a studio space. One would have to be critical of Conway’s adaptation as sacrificing reflection on contemporary politics for the sake of narrative development. However this is very much in line with Hollywood’s bourgeoisie approach to not allowing the director-artist to break out of the succession of events to engage with contemporary reality.
The film is memorable for the performance of Ronald Colman as Sidney Carlton. The actor agreed to play the role of Sydney Carton with the sole condition that he not also be required to play the role of Charles Darnay, as was usually expected in adaptations of the Dickens novel which is based on the physical resemblance between the two characters. Lux Radio Theater broadcast a 60 minute radio adaptation of the movie on January 12, 1942 with Ronald Colman reprising his film role.
Before being nominated for the two Academy Awards, the film received critical acclaim at its opening. Its most erudite response came from Andre Sennwald of the New York Times of December 26, 1935 who believed ‘Dickensian magic’ in the film ‘crowds the screen with beauty and excitement, sparing nothing in its recital of the Englishmen who were caught up in the blood and terror of the French Revolution.’ The film is a curious entry into the list of Dickens’ adaptation from Hollywood’s Golden Era.
Reference:
George Woodcock, Penguin Classic