You’ve Got Mail-James Stewart’s The Shop Around The Corner (1940)-A Film Review

DVD Review

By Si Lannon

The Shop Around The Corner, starring James Stewart, Margaret Sullavan, based on the play by Hungarian playwright Miklos Laszlo, 1940

Sometimes you just have to concede defeat in this movie reviewing business. Granted I don’t do nearly as many film reviews as I used when I started out slaving away for Greg Green when he was over at American Film Gazette but I still keep my hand in and believe that I can figure out what old boss Sam Lowell called the “hook” on a story. This film, The Shop Around The Corner, baffles me though as I will explain in a minute. Even Sam’s old chestnut about looking at the “slice of life” aspect if all else fails fails here since there is no “slice of life” aspect that an American audience would gravitate to so we are left with the holy of holies-the boy meets girl story line that has saved a million Hollywood movies and two million film reviews. I never liked to pitch a movie that way by there you have it. By the way Seth Garth told me when he reviewed Meg Ryan and Tom Hanks’ You’ve Got Mail in 1998 which is based on the same play by Hungary playwright Miklos Laszlo he had the same befuddlement (his term) and was reduced to the formula boy meets girl last desperate gasp.            

Here’s where the dilemma comes in right from the first scene. We are supposed to believe this whole story takes place in a luxury goods shop on a downtown street in Budapest, Hungary in the 1930s but from the get-go this stage scene could have been anywhere, any city in the world, except for the few signs in Serbo-Croatian or Magyar or whatever language those guys and gals speak. Moreover the lead characters Klara Novik, played by Margaret Sullavan, and Alfred Kralik, played by James Stewart are straight out the central committee of WASP nation so the whole feel is wrong. You can see why I too am befuddled.       

So down in the mud to that “boy meets girl” sinkhole-with a twist. Klara and Alfred have “met” through, no, not the Internet that is today’s method among some, a personal ad in a newspaper and have been cheerfully corresponding via, no, not e-mails, that too is today’s method but letters via a post office box drop. They have many interests in common but as we rev up they have never met. We learn all of this second hand when Alfred, lead salesman in the leather goods shop, tells a sympathetic fellow employee about his good fortune. For years the owner, an onsite owner, has relied on Alfred to keep his business afloat which he has done despite occasional differences (although why the owner has so many employees in such a small and for most of the film almost empty shop is another conundrum producer).        

The way Alfred and Klara “meet” in person (without knowing they are co-correspondents) is the day when Klara shows up looking for work and she is able to con the owner in hiring her. Naturally to maintain some kind of dramatic tension they don’t like each other and harbor romantic feelings only for the phantom “other” co-correspondent who ultimately agree to meet in a public place (good idea). The works get jammed up though through a subplot where the wife of the owner is having an affair with a womanizing employee (who would seem to be number one to let go just to cut labor costs) who the owner mistakenly thinks is Alfred. Alfred gets the sack, for a while. As it turned out the owner had hired detectives to follow the wife and that was the end of that caddish womanizer and the return of Alfred as a manager since the owner was so distraught he had attempted suicide. Had been hospitalized and told to take life easier.  

But back to Klara and Alfred. Through a happenstance, nice word right, Alfred finds out Klara is his pen pal. What to do, what to do. As it turned out Alfred had romantic feelings for Klara as pen pal or as fellow employee and he plays that card for a while before he finally clues her in that he, she have been correspondents-and soon to be lovers. Yeah, classic boy meets girl stuff in Budapest, or Bucharest. Yawn.