“Yes, Mrs Matuschek… noooo Mrs Matuschek…”
There are are films which stay with you long after the end credits have rolled.
Spend Friday Night At the Flicks with Elizabeth Ellen Carter
They are the ones which give you one lines – private jokes that you share with your beloved and eventually become terms of endearments that last for years.
These lines often come from the supporting characters who, despite not receiving top billing, just about steal the show.
Then these films get re-made – which is just as well because serves to show just how cannibalistic Hollywood is.
Tonight’s Friday Night at the Flicks is a double bill based on the same story – 1940’s The Shop Around The Corner and 1998’s You’ve Got Mail.
The Shop Around The Corner starring Jimmy Stewart and Margaret Sullavan is interesting for a couple of different reasons.
The first is its setting.
Rather than transplant the 1937 Hungarian Play Parfumerie in to an American setting – as the later 1998 film does, the film maintains its middle European location.
First was the bankability of producer-director Ernst Lubitsch whose fabulous 1939 romantic comedy Ninotchka (co-written by Billy Wilder whose work is worth a Friday Night @ the Flicks in its own right), starring Greta Garbo and Melvyn Douglas was a major box office and critical success whose Oscar spotlight was stolen by Gone With The Wind.
Ninotchka – the publicity posters billed it as Garbo Laughs – was a political comedy as much as it was a romantic comedy with Garbo playing a dour Soviet apparatchik who, while on official business in Paris, falls in love with a decadent capitalistic businessman.
I personally believe another reason for keeping The Shop Around The Corner distinctly Hungarian (rather than setting it in, say a Jewish borough of New York) was to help make American movie-goers more sympathetic to the people of Europe.
Why, fancy seeing you here!
In 1940, World War Two was in its first year and America was staunchly isolationist. Many of Hollywood’s top directors and stars were European – Lubitsch was a Russian born German national whose citizenship was revoked in Nazi Germany in 1936 – and if America was to be persuaded to support Britain and her Commonwealth allies, she had to be given a reason to care.
And who couldn’t love all American boy Jimmy Stewart? Incidentally, Stewart saw active war service and retired with the rank of Brigadier General of the Air Force Reserves.
His co-star in this film was the trouble actress Margaret Sullavan (who was briefly married to Henry Fonda). Here Margaret plays Stewart’s sales clerk colleague and they irritate one another badly – neither one realising that the other is the intelligent and romantic pen pal they have been corresponding and a near tragedy threatens to pull them apart permanently.
The mistaken identity trope was revisited in 1998’s You’ve Got Mail by one of the few consistently successful women directors in Hollywood Nora Ephron, who sadly died last year.
If George Clooney is this generation’s Cary Grant, then Tom Hanks is this generation’s Jimmy Stewart, slightly geeky, unassuming, likeable and with the right material, downright adorable.
In this film instead of colleagues Hanks and Meg Ryan are business rivals who fall in love anonymous over the new fangled Internet.
The Shop Around The Corner addresses its politics (if it truly had any) with subtlety, concentrating instead of the development of the romantic relationship that blossoms between Stewart and Sullavan’s characters, and the heartbreak of the lost of love in a heartbreaking performance by Frank Morgan.
In You’ve Got Mail, the message is a subtle as yesterday’s spam.
To quote a reviewer from IMDB:
This was an all right movie, but can I make just one little observation? If the movie is trying to make a social statement about big book chains with no personality (like Hank’s Fox Books) greedily driving the little stores with charm (like Ryan’s Shop around the Corner) out of business, how is it that the filmmakers chose to put every other scene in a Starbucks? Starbucks has undoubtedly forced more little shops out of business that any big book chain has.
This doesn’t mean that it’s not an enjoyabe movie. But it takes something away from Meg’s righteous indignation when she woefully closes the bookstore and then goes to suck down a Mochacino.
As we’ve noted here before, arts and entertainment are excellent vehicles for social messaging but to truly create a classic and enduring film like The Shop Around The Corner – is listed in Time’s All-Time 100 Movies and declared by the US Library of Congress as being “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant – it has to have love and it has to have heart.
Enjoy the trailer for The Shop Around The Corner: