In my youth I set myself the task of reading Dickens. I read Great Expectations, David Copperfield, Little Dorrit and a few other novels with great pleasure. I decided that I could skip the ones I judged weaker, and so I never bothered with A Tale of Two Cities. On the basis of this ITV series I made the right choice. Dickens is never interesting when he deals with events taking place before he was born, and so it is here. I don't care about Dr. Manette and his daughter, Sidney Carton and his death-wish, or any of the other plot threads.The cast is starry: John Mills, James Wilby, Jean-Pierre Aumont, Anna Massey (whom I remember from so many TV dramas) and many more capable performers, many of them French. The sets are well-designed, costumes appropriate... ho hum.

I think the commenter from Florida may be discussing the awful film made for television in the early '80s. This mini-series made in 1989 does not have no-name B-list actors. They are all superb British and French actors. I would just caution people that they need to be aware which version they have gotten hold of to watch. The costuming is they only thing that seems a little out of place in this version. As to highlights of this version, I would have to say that James Wilby as Sidney Carton does excellent work. He is actually heartbreaking to watch. It is easy to make this pivotal character much too maudlin, but this is not the case here.

It's pretty good, actually, and long enough to have some of Dickens' subplots and subincidents covered in more detail. Plus it was filmed in England and Bordeaux. Yet, without knowing exactly why, I think I'd prefer the 1935 version with Ronald Coleman.It's a little tough on the endurance factor to sit through an entire miniseries that depends almost entirely on talk, intrigue, treachery, and politics. The 30s version compresses much of the story and makes it easier to follow. There were times during flashback in this miniseries that I was confused about who was who and what exactly was going on.And in some curious way, the earlier set-bound Hollywood version looks more believable than the real location shooting. Yes, okay, those are real French streets we're looking at here, but the Hollywood streets look the way real French streets OUGHT to look. I should mention in passing that Dickens took some pains to set up his first scene. In the novel he paints an evocative picture of a stagecoach, its horses struggling to pull it up hill through the mud, the passengers walking beside it through the night, with frosty breaths. An unknown horseman approaches. The coach driver unlimbers his blunderbuss, fearing a highwayman, but the rider turns out to be a harmless messenger. That initial scene is there for a reason. It prefigures the confusion and mixed identities that are to follow. They captured the scene in 1935, but here the meeting simply takes place during the peaceful daytime transit of the coach.The performances in the 1935 version were sometimes extraordinarily hammy. Madam LaFarge is straight out of a DeMille silent movie. Here they are Britishized, quiet and understated. If Jarvis Lorry, the banker, was played in 1935 by an actor who looked mean and kept everyone at a distance, it made the ultimate revelation of his humanity more poignant. Here the businessman is John Mills, a kindly, soft-spoken, sympathetic character from start to finish.The principals too don't really measure up to the original cast. Ronald Coleman is a magnet on screen. In this version Sidney Carton is quiet, not nearly dissolute enough, and looks disturbingly like Timothy Hutton. Lucie is a dud in both versions, as was her character in the novel.Dickens has given us a good story, one in which the Brits, while hardly flawless, are above the nastiness of the Parisians. It seems to be in the nature of revolutions to be excessive. And how human beings DO love seeing people get their heads lopped off at public executions. The people being killed of course are always "the enemy." Of course, since we are all someone's enemy, it puts every one of us at risk. What's truly repulsive is not so much the enemy's end. Everybody must die sooner or later. It's the pleasure that the executioners derive from the death.If we look at the human brain we see what looks like a walnut, the cerebral cortex, whose chief function seems to be to damp down the impulses generated by the lower-level reptilian brain, the part that wants nothing more than to eat, sleep, satisfy its sexual urges, and kill.If we run out of political reasons to take vengeance, we pass beyond the pale into the personal, as Madam DeFarge does. In both versions of this story, I am all for M. DeFarge, who sits alone in his tavern while the blade of the guillotine continues its ghastly work and mutters over and over -- "Enough is enough." If you must pick one of the two versions to see, I'd advise checking out Coleman in 1935. This one isn't bad at all, but it does have its longeurs.

I rented this movie without expectation, thinking it was just another mini series made in the 80's with poor lighting and wacky hairstyles. But I was blown away by it! The innocence and heartbreaking bittersweetness of the movie gripped me, and of the thousands of movies I've watched I have never seen one with this astounding of character development. Even if you generally don't enjoy movies like this, I recommend to give it a try! It's not easily found, but if you are lucky enough to stumble across it you'll love it. The set and hairstyles are very 80's-ish, but the acting and characters are so perfectly drawn I didn't notice anything but them! Sydney Carton now ranks right up there with Sir Percy Blakeney (from The Scarlet Pimpernel) on my list of ideal men.