The Shop around the corner [NTSC]

James Stewart is Alfred Kralik, the head clerk at a fashionable department store in depression-era Hungary. Margaret Sullavan is Klara Novak, a young woman desperate to find work. When Klara tricks the stores owner, Matuschek (Frank Morgan), into giving her a job, she and Kralik discover that they can’t stand each other. What they don’t realise though is that they may be enemies at work, but they are also the recipients of each others’ tender, poetic love letters. Ernst Lubitsch’s comedies define the classical period of Hollywood cinema. From the simplest of plot machinations, Lubitsch is able to construct an elegant, timeless farce, a romantic comedy which is alert to the way people love and work together. Filmed largely on the one set of the Matuschek department store, Lubitsch creates a dazzling centre-piece for his film, a space which is by turns magical when alive with customers, joyous when everyone is getting along, and full of sadness when one finds themselves alone in it. James Stewart and Margaret Sullavan make a delightful, bickering couple. Frank Morgan gives his role of the cuckolded Matuschek a real nobility and dignity. The supporting cast, including William Tracy and Sara Haden, features some of classical Hollywood’s finest supporting talents. Ben Hecht, though uncredited, is one of the scriptwriters on the deliciously acerbic screenplay. “The Shop Around the Corner” was remade in the late 1990s as the film “You’ve Got Mail”. Any comparison would indicate that in the ensuing fifty years, Hollywood has lost maturity, lost grace and, most disturbingly, lost the ability to create humorous complex characters on the silver screen.