The Shop Around the Corner (1940)

Official trailer

The Shop Around the Corner is Ernst Lubitsch’s 1940 American romantic comedy adapted from Miklós László’s Hungarian play Parfumerie, depicting two Budapest leather-goods clerks who can’t stand each other in person while unknowingly conducting an anonymous correspondence courtship. James Stewart plays Alfred Kralik. Margaret Sullavan plays Klara Novak. Frank Morgan plays Hugo Matuschek, the shop owner. Joseph Schildkraut plays Ferencz Vadas. Sara Haden plays Flora. Felix Bressart plays Pirovitch. Samson Raphaelson wrote the screenplay. MGM produced the film and released it in January 1940.

Two remakes followed The Shop Around the Corner: the musical In the Good Old Summertime in 1949 and the email-era You’ve Got Mail in 1998.

I adore this film. It’s warm without going soft and funny without mugging, and it’s so precise about how people behave at work that I’d believe the clerks still clock in at Matuschek and Company. The romance gets top billing, and I care just as much about who’s in trouble with the boss. My one quibble is that Pirovitch deserved more screen time.

Lubitsch’s direction lives in the spaces between what characters say and what they mean. The film is set almost entirely inside Matuschek and Company, a small leather-goods shop that the viewer comes to know room by room across the picture’s running time. The romance is real but secondary to the workplace social architecture: who’s in good standing with the boss, who’s angling for whose job, who has loaned whom money, who’s sleeping with whose wife.

The film treats the shop as a small society with weather, and the Christmas Eve resolution belongs in the genre because the shop’s annual social calendar reaches its conclusion at the holiday.

Lubitsch’s Workplace Anatomy

Few workplace films in American cinema are as closely observed as The Shop Around the Corner. Each clerk has visible relationships with each other clerk and with Matuschek. Pirovitch’s loyalty to Kralik is established through a single scene about loaning him money. Vadas’s hostility is set up through what he says when nobody else is listening. The cumulative effect is a workplace the viewer believes existed before the film opened and will exist after it closes.

Lubitsch trusts his actors and his audience. Background gestures matter. The shop’s morning routine, the customer interactions, the dynamics of who answers the telephone and who handles the demanding customer, all read as observed instead of designed. The film doesn’t point at its work. The work simply shows. How little Lubitsch explains is a gift. A glance between clerks tells you who’s nervous around the boss, and I get the whole social order of that shop before anyone spells it out.

Stewart and Sullavan

Stewart and Sullavan had worked together twice previously and had a settled performance rhythm by 1940. The film exploits this. Their hostility scenes work because the audience can sense the underlying compatibility the characters can’t. Their letter scenes work because the audience can sense the longing both characters carry into work each morning.

Stewart’s Kralik is one of his finest performances. The character must be sympathetic when wronged, comically irritable when frustrated, vulnerable when reading his anonymous correspondent’s letters, and quietly furious when he discovers Klara is his pen pal. Stewart calibrates every tone. Sullavan matches him beat for beat.

I think Stewart is better here than in almost anything else he made. The moment he realizes Klara is his pen pal is my favorite in the film, because he plays the discovery so quietly and lets the anger and the tenderness fight it out on his face.

Frank Morgan’s Matuschek

Frank Morgan’s Matuschek is the film’s underappreciated structural element. The shop owner’s marital crisis runs parallel to the Kralik-Klara story and gives the film its serious emotional weight. Morgan’s suicide attempt and his Christmas Eve conversation with the young delivery boy are some of the strongest scenes in any Lubitsch film.

Morgan was Lubitsch’s frequent collaborator and the casting brings pathos to a role that could have been merely the proprietor function. His final Christmas Eve dinner with the new errand boy is shot with patience and without sentimentality, and it justifies the holiday-emotion the title genre traditionally trades on.

The Christmas Eve dinner with the errand boy is the scene that lifts this film to a 9 for me. Morgan plays a lonely old man trying not to look lonely, and I find it more moving than the main romance. Lubitsch could have milked it and he doesn’t.

Does The Shop Around the Corner still hold up?

I’d put The Shop Around the Corner at the top of the list of American romantic comedies, and it’s the warmest Christmas film I know. It gets a 9 because every scene in the shop feels observed from life, and it misses a 10 only because I wanted more of Pirovitch and the other clerks than the romance leaves room for.

You’ve Got Mail changed the technology and didn’t improve on a thing. Anyone interested in romantic comedy, workplace films or Lubitsch should start here.

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