A Tale of Two Cities (1980 film) A Tale of Two Cities (1980 film) A Tale of Two Cities is a 1980 American made-for-television historical drama film directed by Jim Goddard and starring Chris Sarandon, who plays dual roles as two characters who are in love with the same woman. It is based on the Charles Dickens novel of the same name set in the French Revolution. Dickens' London-lawyer hero (Chris Sarandon) makes the ultimate sacrifice for the woman he loves in Paris during the Reign of Terror. Producer Norman Rosemont specialised in adaptations of classic novels. Most of the $5 million budget came from Hallmark Greeting
A Tale of Two Cities the end of the novel, Dickens foresees a resurrected social order in France, rising from the ashes of the old one. Hans Biedermann writes that water "is the fundamental symbol of all the energy of the unconscious—an energy that can be dangerous when it overflows its proper limits (a frequent dream sequence)." This symbolism suits Dickens's novel; in "A Tale of Two Cities", the frequent images of water stand for the building anger of the peasant mob, an anger that Dickens sympathizes with to a point, but ultimately finds irrational and even animalistic. Early in the book, Dickens suggests this