The Shop Around the Corner (1940). 99 minutes. Directed by Ernst Lubitsch. Starring Margaret Sullavan (as Klara Novak), James Stewart (as Alfred Kralik), Frank Morgan (as Hugo Matuschek), Joseph Schildkraut (as Ferencz Vadas), Sara Haden (as Flora Kaczek), Felix Bressart (as Pirovitch), William Tracy (as Pepi Katona), Inez Courtney (as Ilona Novotny), Charles Halton (as detective), and Charles Smith (as Rudy). Written by Samuel Raphaelson.
Ernst Lubitsch’s wonderful The Shop Around the Corner centers on a high-end Hungarian boutique at Christmastime, but the movie is about so much more than business during the holidays. In that store, two clerks, Alfred and Klara, write to pen pals that they fall in love with—not realizing that they are writing to each other. In contrast to the way they feel about their pen pals, in everyday life they loathe each other and bicker constantly, and therefore, as we know, they must eventually come to love each other outside of the letter writing. It is a classic Hollywood setup, like most of the Astaire-Rogers films, and so it should come as no surprise that The Shop Around the Corner has been remade and borrowed from numerous times, most notably in movies such as In the Good Old Summertime (1949) and You’ve Got Mail (1998).
But in spite of the strong Christmas vibes, which we might assume make for a happy story, there is depression, a nervous breakdown, and a suicide attempt in this movie. Indeed, The Shop Around the Corner remains one of the most moving depictions of heartache that I have seen in a Golden Age film. True, it manages to couple this sadness with comedy, business talk, and good old-fashioned displays of holiday cheer; but the film returns again and again to delicate depictions of the vulnerable nature of our jobs, our relationships, and our existence. This focus seems appropriate for a story based on a 1937 play, filmed in 1940, and set in Europe—an overall period and a place where life was especially fragile, even though the film is devoid of any references to World War II. The Shop Around the Corner’s prolonged examination of private affairs offers a distraction from the realities of the time while reminding us of just how tenuous our lives truly are. From Ernst Lubitsch and screenwriter Samuel Raphaelson, I would expect no less.
The Shop Around the Corner can be successfully summarized on a high level: employees at a Hungarian store work through the winter and find their relationships tested. More specifically, Alfred and Klara are the clerks who fall in love with each other through an anonymous letter exchange but do not realize it. When Alfred learns the identity of his pen friend, he manipulates Klara (who does not know her pen friend’s true identity), deliberately causing her to feel rejected. While all of this is taking place, the owner of the store, Mr. Matuschek, suspects that his wife is having an affair with one of his employees. He assumes that it is Alfred and fires him. An investigator confirms the affair and reveals that the culprit is really his employee Vadas. Mr. Matuschek attempts suicide, but his attempt is prevented by Pepi, the store’s errand boy. Mr. Matuschek is sent to a hospital and nursed back into good health. He reinstates Alfred, and everyone rallies for Christmas Eve in the little shop. At the movie’s conclusion, after making record sales, the employees retire to spend the evening with loved ones, while Alfred closes up the shop with Klara, openly confessing his love for her, which she reciprocates.
The Shop Around the Corner is in touch with the commercial aspect of Christmas that exploded in the twentieth century. We see a cash register ringing up prices, hard sells, bargaining, people doing inventory, and the paying of bonuses. The bustling store is a delight to see. We also hear constant talk of pricing as well as reports of competition from other stores, especially regarding how busy competitors are. There is an extended joke about a bad business idea: Mr. Matuschek thinks musical cigarette boxes that play “Ochi Chërnye” will sell well and so buys them en masse. The public, however, does not fancy them, and the boxes end up marked down to a fraction of their former price only a short time afterward. Business in the shop (like business everywhere) fluctuates, and Christmas Eve is the time when the store is overflowing with customers. The movie supports the assumption that Christmas is a natural time for getting stores back “into the black”—or in other words, turning a profit.
Most impressively, The Shop Around the Corner conveys its capitalist bent through the concept of window shopping. We repeatedly see people looking into Matuschek’s shop windows at displays of cigarette boxes and suitcases, and even discussing window shopping. The movie also focuses its attention on windows when we see employees waiting outside of the shop for their day to begin and working late to rearrange and correct holiday decorations in the windows (after we hear Matuschek critiquing the window displays). Although the act of looking and observing through store windows in this movie is of a commercial nature, it nevertheless evokes the spirit of voyeurism, of peeping into other environments and taking in other people’s lives.
The scenes hovering around the shop’s windows prepare us for another kind of voyeurism, for the phenomenon of looking and observing in The Shop Around the Corner is not limited to a commercial context. Indeed, once Klara’s secret identity is revealed to Alfred, his relationship with her takes on a strong voyeuristic quality both literally and figuratively. For example, outside of a café window, first Alfred’s coworker Pirovitch and then Alfred take a lengthy look at Klara as she waits for a date with her mystery man. The two men understand full well that the man is Alfred, and when he goes inside to taunt her, she and he are seated in front of a window. When Alfred visits Klara while she is sick and heartbroken, he peeks through a curtained window inside of her apartment, listens to her read his letter out loud (she does not know that he is the author), and observes her face. In the movie’s final scene, he supplies her with false information about the man who writes the letters, paying close attention to how she reacts. These scenes underscore the extent to which, outside of the shop environment, voyeurism (especially Alfred’s) can be an unpleasant activity.
Yes, all-American Jimmy Stewart is playing a creep in The Shop Around the Corner, and he happens to portray creeps in some of his best-regarded movies, including Rear Window (1954) where he plays a character who obsessively watches his neighbors through his apartment window; and Vertigo (1958) where he plays a man who manipulates and controls a woman who resembles someone that he used to love (that woman is portrayed by the actress Kim Novak, who coincidentally shares a last name with Klara’s character in The Shop Around the Corner). In Rear Window, Stewart’s character at least solves a crime through his voyeurism. In The Shop Around the Corner, it is not clear that Alfred solves anything through his spying on Klara. What is clear is that her suffering is prolonged the longer he keeps his identity a secret.
Much as The Shop Around the Corner depicts people engaged in the act of observation, it also highlights the phenomenon of keeping up appearances. It follows that while The Shop Around the Corner is a story about a business, it is also a story about private business. For example, after parting ways with his wife, Mr. Matuschek searches for someone to spend Christmas Eve with but tries not to reveal his longing and desperation for company. His attempt to nonchalantly solicit a dining companion from among his employees that evening is subtle, but the private heartache that he feels is palpable, even though he does not express it in words. Frank Morgan is wonderful here in the role of Mr. Matuschek.
Yes, while outside of the shop in a shower of snow, Matuschek finally connects with Rudy, the new errand boy, and offers to share an elaborate feast with him, complete with all of the trimmings; Rudy accepts the invitation. But we realize before this moment that Mr. Matuschek could very well be alone on Christmas Eve. How on earth would he manage? We’ve seen him recently suicidal and sadly realize that his happiness is hanging by a thread. When Rudy agrees to accompany him to dinner, Mr. Matuschek has rescued the boy from a lonely Christmas Eve. But we know that Mr. Matuschek is the one who is truly being rescued in this moment, even if he does not admit it. Matuschek’s search for a dinner partner is so sweet; it is one of the most moving scenes in a moving film, and one of my favorite sequences in all of 1940s cinema. But it almost does not happen.
We see so many moments of desperation in The Shop Around the Corner. In one scene, we see Klara’s gloved hand (only her hand) unlocking her post box and crawling around in search of a letter from her lover, but finding none. It is easy to register the disappointment, the heartbreak, simply in the movements of the gloved hand. Because we do not view the person that the hand belongs to, it becomes anyone’s hand—all of our hands, searching hopefully for love but winding up disappointed and alone.
There is a sense in this movie that life and relationships are fragile—Matuschek is devastated because of barely a few minutes of conversation with the detective who has been following his wife. Klara becomes ill because she believes that her letter pal has abandoned her, and collapses in the store the day after he does not show up for their date. Consider also how Klara and Alfred, when they still don’t know each other’s true identities, strive to make it to that first date together even after delays, with no way of being in touch with or notifying each other that they will be late. The only immediate communication that they have in place is the red carnations that they have promised to display in order to identify themselves to each other.
The Shop Around the Corner depicts so many missed (or nearly missed) opportunities: look at how close we come to losing everything, the movie seems to say. Even the fact that the protagonists can thrill over and over again to each others’ words as preserved on delicate pieces of paper speaks to the movie’s emphasis not merely on the tangible aspects of communication but on the fragility of love itself. The Shop Around the Corner’s central romance provides us with a window into the characters’ most private selves and what sustains them, but it also provides us with insight into the human condition and a glimpse of how we walk a frail tightrope in our relationships.
The character who walks the frail tightrope the longest in The Shop Around the Corner is Klara. While we must not forget that the movie is a comedy—and we laugh at Klara and Alfred’s sharp exchanges, the awful musical cigarette boxes, and the antics of Pepi the errand boy—from Klara’s perspective The Shop Around the Corner is a dramatic rollercoaster. For her, this movie is fraught with missed chances, lost connections, and longing. She begins the movie destitute and desperate for a job. Later, when she believes that she has been stood up by her lover, then ultimately becomes convinced he has been lying to her for her money, she succumbs to despair. Margaret Sullavan as Klara creates a spirited character who will eventually be a suitable romantic partner for Alfred but who is also a woman easily consumed by anguish.
Klara’s romance—the one she thinks she is having with her pen friend—is, of course, a lie. The process of falling in love is for her fueled by a love of fantasy. She is not the only one to fall under the sway of fantasy, however, for both Klara and Alfred develop romantic feelings for imaginary partners. The difference is that Klara’s exposure to fantasy is kept alive by Alfred. When Alfred tells her lies about her pen friend—that he is old, fat, and itching to get at her money—he is feeding her another fantastic story, just not one that she wants. But she believes it nonetheless. So in the end she barely has a moment to adjust to Alfred’s in-person declaration of love. “Psychologically, I’m very confused… But personally, I don’t feel bad at all,” she concludes, smiling.
But how can we believe her? It is true that she admits to initially having had feelings for Alfred, but only he is given real time to adjust his feelings of love and redirect them to Klara. He is clearly falling in love with her, but does she get the chance to really fall in love with him? We might agree that both Klara and Alfred need to be disabused of their pen-pal fantasies and brought into reality. We might even go so far as to argue that in The Shop Around the Corner, the illusion of love successfully gives way to something more real, but for at least one of the lovers, there simply is not time for real love to fully develop. Ultimately the movie has its own fantasy—for while it destroys the fantasies of its protagonists, it simultaneously insists that we believe in a fantastic ending for them, where they both become clear-sighted, happy, and in love in a mere moment. Unfortunately, real love needs more than a moment to flicker on, even at Christmas.
For Klara, Alfred, Mr. Matuschek, and the others, there is more heartbreak on the horizon, for the Hungary that the film takes place in would become a member of the Axis powers in 1940, the year that The Shop Around the Corner was released. It is therefore particularly moving to watch this story of clerks working in central Europe given what was unfolding there at the time. For The Shop Around the Corner offers its viewers more than just the fantasy of Alfred and Klara’s quickly realized romance: it exults in the idea that the pristine past of luxurious, pre-war holiday dinners; cheerful stores with their music boxes and leather wallets; and business as usual were all still flourishing in Hungary. And it also supports the fantasy that people’s greatest concerns could still be the identities of their pen pals. Considering that Lubitsch’s slightly later To Be or Not to Be (1942) reflects the director’s interest in addressing the Nazi regime head on, The Shop Around the Corner’s reticence concerning the conflict in Europe underscores the extent to which Lubitsch could also offer an alternative, escapist viewpoint.
The real world may have been estranged from the dreamland of the film, but we should not forget that the film is itself, through its more sobering elements, estranged from the fantasy it spins up. The Shop Around the Corner tempts us through its luscious daydream of a Hungary full of romance and bustling Christmas economics, but ultimately it is hard to see past its blatant ennui. The winter of relationships is long and hard, even in the movies, even in stories that sparkle with beauty; and soon enough the world would enter into its own long, cold winter—one that would pull everyone away from the shop windows.
