Tale of Two Cities (1981)

 As a young child, I really didn't know of anything by Dickens other than Scrooge. In fact, I sometimes wondered if this man had ever written anything else. My first real exposure of Dickens beyond Scrooge was A Tale of Two Cities, in the then-current issue of Scope magazine, a publication for junior high kids. 

   At first I didn't care for the tale, because I small peasant boy gets run over by a callous noble in a carriage. Gaspard, the poor child's grieving father, later climbs into the marquis's bedchamber and murders him (I recall this scene vividly from the movie when it aired), but is caught and executed. The fault of the Marquis de Evermonde (for that is who it is, of course,) is not so much that he hit a child (that was an accident) as his callous response to it. I hated the deaths of children even back then. What's more, I really didn't understand most of the story, or it's political and ethical significance, including Carton's noble sacrifice at the end. I was just sad he got executed. I recall there was a paperback at the time that contained stills from the movie. 

    

The movie stars Chris Sanderson in the duel roles of Charles Darnay, the innocent heir to the Evermonde family, and Sydney Carton, the man who becomes his savior. And also Peter Cushing as Dr. Marnette. I can't recall the name of the actress who played Madame Defarge, but yes, that's her on the cover of Scope, and she does a marvelous job of being embittered and vengeful at what was done to her family by the Evermondes. DeFarge is, in fact, a very well crafted depiction of someone who has embraced whole heartedly the concept of collective guilt. She and her fanatic cohorts go well out of their way to use Manette's diary to convict Darnay of the crime of--basically, being an Evermonde. She even goes so far as to seek out Darnay's wife and young child to murder them before her fatal struggle with Miss Pross (Tell the fire and wind where to stop! I will have them all!) Even her husband, who rather grudgingly puts up with Darnay's conviction, rebels at this. A more devastating depiction of the evils of scapegoating there never was. 

Some years later, when the Clive Donner production of The Scarlet Pimpernel became my favorite of all movies, I tended to think of it as a Dickens movie, even though it was not. Pimpernel,was after all, part of my "big three" of Donner adaptations, long with Twist and Carol. All of these had scores by Nick and Tony Bicet, and some of the same actors had roles in each of them. Like Tale, Baroness Orczy's Pimpernel series relied very much on the concept of innocent people wrongly condemned merely for having been born into the former ruling class. Orczy was, admittedly, biased on the side of the aristos; she was a member of the Austrian aristocracy herself, and there was, as I recall, a rebellion when she was young, and she feared what might happen if it were taken too far. The villains in the Pimpernel novels, are not, for the most part, the starving and vengeful underclass, but the ambitious bourgeoisie, including Robespierre and Chauvelin who are primarily motivated by power, and use the rage of the disenfrancised to attain it. 

 Dickens, though, depicts terrible atrocities wrought by both callous and privileged aristos and fanatic revolutionaries. He crafts an accurate and disturbing portrait of human psychology, personified primarily in Madame Defarge. Through her, we are shown how and why humans are given to revenge and scapegoating. Even Dr. Manette's diary shows that even he, when imprisoned by the Evermonde's pens something in rage which he will later come to regret. Orczy never really goes that deep.

I didn't actually read Tale until college (though not for a class--they never seemed to have good classes on Dickens at Purdue), and a still remember haunting passages. One of the finest was during the real Darnay and family's flight from Paris: Look back, see if we are pursued!...the whole wild night rushes after us...but we are pursued by nothing else.

On a side note, I don't know much further about Chris Sanderson's acting career, but he did play the Frankenstein Monster on a Thanksgiving afternoon special. It was so dark and morbid I had to turn it off. Which I later learned was why it was so much truer to the original than most of the movies!