Bloated, big-budget soaper from MGM, shrill with treacly, over-the-top melodrama. This grabs your throat as if intent on choking you. Nothing is left to the imagination. Subtlety is ground into dust. Heroes and villains, good and evil, are starkly black and white. Of incidental interest are brilliant crowd scenes, the storming of the Bastille, devised by Val Lewton and Jacques Tourneur (cf., their horror, B-movie collaborations in the '40s).
Review of A Tale of Two Cities
