Because of its adaptation from a play written by the Hungarian dramatist Miklós László, the screenplay of The Shop Around the Corner takes as its setting the wintertime streets of Budapest—at first blush a strange and even arbitrary location for a group of well-groomed and fast-talking Americans, all of whom inevitably speak the language of the New World. And yet even without this tidbit that gives some explanation for its choice of setting, The Shop Around the Corner has all the charm and thaumaturgy, humble as it is, to capture the attention of those willing to go along with the artifice and to repay them many times over. In retrospect, Matuschek and Company has become for me as inseparable from its location as is Christmas from its decorations, or white from its snow.
With the rapid approach of the holiday season, the owner and manager of the homey and inviting leather-goods store, the high-strung Mr. Matuschek, has to confront the painful suspicions that his wife has been having an affair with his most seasoned employee—the youthful and dapper Alfred Kralik, played by James Stewart. The relations between these start to deteriorate and in the meantime a young and pert novitiate, the newest employee of Matuschek and Company, Klara Novak, goes tit-for-tat with Alfred Kralik in an ongoing sequence of tiffs and disagreements after their uncordial first meeting.
But while in person they are like two belligerent siblings condemned to be near each other for an eternity, they have been engaging their wits and their hearts by writing to each other anonymous letters each of whose addressees they think is far superior to this person they have to work with. It is a setup, this, but one that is carried off with a delicacy and a variety attributable to its German-born American director Ernst Lubitsch, who deals with this romantic comedy like a true-born professional.
In addition to the intimate development of each of its characters, The Shop Around the Corner engages multiple points of view that give rise to a fondness for each of them even within the limitations of so short and compact a story. This is an attention to detail suffusing the lives of the characters as much as the poignant love that blossoms between the two lonely romantics, Klara and Alfred; touching on real loneliness and the neediness innate to this kind of romantic idealism, the depiction of their strange courtship has a number of unique moments, as for instance that of the mailbox into whose empty and paperless space Klara reaches her gloved hand, showing afterward her face, which has grown weary and almost haggard.
A shot of the torsos of the lanky and by-now languid Alfred Kralik and his still-uninformed Klara Novak sitting on one of the many benches in the darkened Christmas-Eve shop is another nourished by this attention to detail, and it reminded me of a similar love-in-melancholy found in that hopeful disappointment of Bob and Charlotte in Lost in Translation: there is the leaning in and all the settling dust of disillusionment, and the same empty silence in the wake of fleeing dreams.
This true-love thing might not be the stuff for comedy in any so-called romantic comedy. But, asked by his now-enlightened lover to pull up his pants, James Stewart obliges in the final moments. Whatever genre it is, The Shop Around the Corner sticks to its guns, loosing a gunshot here and there and going out with a bang. A wonderful film.
