A Tale of Two Cities is a 1911 silent film produced by Vitagraph Studios, loosely based on the 1859 novel by Charles Dickens.

[1] Many film exhibitors at this time were hesitant to screen pictures of more than one reel, believing that audiences would not tolerate anything longer.

[6] The director Rex Ingram wrote in 1922: "In 1913, when I was studying drawings and sculpture at the Yale School of Fine Arts, a motion picture play, founded upon Charles Dickens' famous story A Tale of Two Cities, came to New Haven.

It followed in the wake of many cut and dried one-reel subjects, and while this picture was necessarily full of imperfections, common to all pioneer films, it marked a tremendous step ahead in the making of them...I left the theatre greatly impressed; absolutely convinced that it would be through the medium of the film play, to the production of which the laws that govern the fine arts had been applied, that a universal understanding and appreciation of art finally would be reached.

"[7] Due to the film's enormous success, Vitagraph reissued A Tale of Two Cities in 1913.