Ronald Colman’s Sydney Carton is an alcoholic barrister who, despite his natural intelligence and legal talent, has allowed his personal life to empty of both love and meaning. Then, despite his dissolute and failed lifestyle, he is offered only the mercy of mere friendship by Miss Manette. The direct result of this, despite all his other dreams having been crushed, is that history suddenly gives Carton the opportunity to perform one of the most famous acts of self-sacrificial mercy in all of literature. Fatally ensnared by revolutionary cruelty, showing mercy can also be an act of heroism, and this act enables Carton to offer strength and comfort to those around him up to the film’s last closing moments.
—Jeremy Purves