9 / 10
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. The screenplay was written by Samson Raphaelson. MGM produced the film and released it in January 1940. The Shop Around the Corner has subsequently been remade as the musical In the Good Old Summertime in 1949 and as the email-era You’ve Got Mail in 1998.
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 is in good standing with the boss, who is angling for whose job, who has loaned whom money, who is 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
The Shop Around the Corner is one of the most precisely observed workplace films in American cinema. 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 rather than designed. The film does not point at its work. The work simply registers.
For Writers
Workplaces in films are most persuasive when secondary characters have full visible relationships with each other rather than only with the protagonist. Watch which characters Pirovitch knows and how.
Stewart and Sullavan
Stewart and Sullavan had worked together three times 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 cannot. 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 register. Sullavan matches him beat for beat.
For Writers
Romantic-comedy chemistry depends on the audience perceiving compatibility the characters do not yet see. Stewart and Sullavan’s earlier collaborations give the audience that perception immediately.
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 genuine 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 earns the holiday-emotion the title genre traditionally trades on.
For Writers
Secondary plot lines about loneliness and aging strengthen romantic comedies that might otherwise collapse into mere flirtation. Matuschek’s loneliness gives the film its emotional density.
Craft Note
Lubitsch was an Austrian-Hungarian immigrant who had escaped Europe in 1922 and the film’s Budapest setting carries the particular flavor of a director rendering his lost world with affection. The screenplay’s specificity about Budapest streetcars, shop hours, customer types, and seasonal rhythms reads as memory rather than research. Production lasted twenty-eight days, modest even by 1940 standards. The shop set was a single MGM construction with rotating walls that allowed Lubitsch’s continuous coverage of multiple shop locations from a single physical space.
Verdict
The Shop Around the Corner is one of the finest American romantic comedies ever produced and one of the warmest Christmas films in the canon. The 1998 You’ve Got Mail update changed the technology but did not improve on the material. A primary text for anyone interested in romantic comedy, workplace cinema, or Lubitsch.
FAQ
Who directed The Shop Around the Corner?
Ernst Lubitsch directed the film. He also directed Trouble in Paradise, Ninotchka, and Heaven Can Wait, among many others.
Is the film based on a play?
Yes. The source is Miklós László’s Hungarian play Parfumerie, first staged in 1937. The film changes some character names and shifts the shop’s products from perfume to leather goods.
Was the film successful when released?
The film was a modest commercial success in 1940 and earned strong reviews. Its critical reputation has grown substantially in subsequent decades and it now ranks among the most respected American romantic comedies.
How many remakes are there?
Two major remakes: In the Good Old Summertime in 1949, a musical version with Judy Garland, and You’ve Got Mail in 1998, which updates the anonymous correspondence to email.
Where was the film shot?
Entirely on MGM soundstages in Culver City, California. The Budapest setting is built through dialogue and costume rather than location.
Did the film win awards?
The film was nominated for the National Board of Review’s annual list and Margaret Sullavan received the New York Film Critics Circle Best Actress Award. No Academy Award nominations.
What is the film’s rating?
The Shop Around the Corner is unrated. The modern equivalent would be G.