25 days of Christmas | The Shop around the corner, 1940

The Shop Around the Corner | 1940

The Shop around the corner is a fantastic movie…

 Last year I read a book called “We were young and at war” , a collection of memories of different people from, all over the world, adolescents, during the second World War. The describe the world as it was in their own words, without holding back or chosing very carefully what to say. Mostly the entries were journal pages, but some of them were letters. Correspondence exchanged between a British boy and an American girl. His name is Brian, her name is Trudy and they had never met. All they knew from each other were their letters…

I had never considered that there were such friendships before the Internet came along. I have met people online whom I have corresponded with for a while, but it’s easy to meet people online. There are entire subreddits dedicated to it… But as it turns out, back in the day, people used newspaper adds to find penpals like this…

They exchanged letters instead of emails, but other than that, it was pretty much the same. I was awestruck by how similar it was as a matter of fact. They started talking about the world, about what life was like in their countries… Then the conversation changed and they started talking about love. She was talking about her ideas for a perfect man and he was struck by how unlike other girls she was, and asking her for a recording of her voice… Just like sometimes happens nowadays, with email penpals… The world really hasn’t changed as much as we think it did.

In fact, that’s exactly the story of ‘The shop around the corner’ of 1940. Two employees at a gift shop can barely stand each other without realizing that they are falling in love with each other through the post as each other’s anonymous pen pals.

Alfred Kralik (Jimmy Stewart) is the top salesman at a leathergoods shop in budapest, owed by Hugo Matuschek. He’s been working diligently for Mr. Matuschek for the past 9 years, first as an apprentice, then a clerk and finally as the top salesman, who enjoys the priviledge of frequent dinner invitations to mr. Matuschek’s home for dinner as his most trusted employee. He often disagrees with the old man – in the matter of a new musical cigarette box, most prominently throughout the movie – and Matuschek seems to value his opinion even more for his bold honesty.

Kralik is good at what he does, and he’s good friends with at least one of his colleagues at the shop, mr. Pirovitch, but he also wants to do more with his life… It is with that intention that he goes to buy an encyclopedia.

"You see, I wanted to buy an encyclopedia. You come to a time in your life when you get tired of going to cafés, dance halls every night, and you want to improve yourself. You want to study something about art, literature and history, how people live in Brazil."

In spite of his good intentions, however, mr. Kralik could not afford a new Encyclopedia, so he looked through the adds in the newspapers and found the add of a girl.

"Modern girl wishes to correspond on cultural subjects anonymously with intelligent, sympathetic, young man." Address: Dear Friend, Post Office Box..."

He wrote to the girl and they have been corresponding for a while now. Four letters they have exchanged, he explains to his friend, Pirovitch, and she is no ordinary girl. He reads bits and pieces of her letters:

"Are you tall? Are you short? Are your eyes blue? Are they brown? Don't tell me. What does it matter so long as our minds meet? There are so many great and beautiful things to discuss in this world of ours. It would be wasting precious moments if we told each other the vulgar details of how we earn our daily bread, so don't let's do it."

Kralik talks about the slow progression of theur romance. How they started talking about cultural topics then emotions, much like Brian and Trudy in ‘We were young and at war’. The size of the letters grows and at some point we see that one of the letters is at least three pages long… It is clear that Kralik is enchanted by his penpal:

“Well, after a while,we got on the subject of love, naturally on a very cultural level. She is the most wonderful girl in the world. Is she pretty? She has such ideals and such a viewpoint on things that she's so far above the girls you meet today, there's no comparison.”

It doesn’t take long before Kralik wants to meet his girl, but then there are all the added tensions of a meeting of that sort. He doesn’t know whether she is pretty or not, and even worst, he doesn’t know whether she’ll think he’s handsome enough! He’s exaggerated a bit in his letters, showing off a little, in a way as to make her expect to meet a pretty important man and he doesn’t want her to be disappointed with him. It’s all very unnerving.

“The boss hands you the envelope. You wonder how much is in it, and you don’t want to open it. As long as the envelope’s closed, you’re a millionaire”.

In addition to that, there has been a lot of tension at work lately. Christmas is approaching and that’s always an important date for commerce. His boss seems to have lost confidence in him for some reason, he knows not which, and a new girl was hired, Miss Novac, who treats him like a dog and makes fun of him, spreading lies that he is bowlegged and has trousers specially made, and making imitations of him in the locker room, walking like a duck.

As it happens though, Miss Novac is the same sensitive girl he’s been corresponding with for the past several weeks. The same girl who’s making him think of marriage…

The story has several important layes beneath the light hearted aspect of it as a romantic comedy. The first of them is how much of ourselves we keep hidden in everyday lives… The story contrasts the main characters, who they are in their letters and who they are in their real lives and that highlights the fact that those two people are in fact one and the same. Kralik is a sensitive well read young man who’s eager and curious to learn more about the world, but he doesn’t let on on that, perhaps because there’s little opportunity to do so in his life at the shop but also because it’s a little scary to expose the most genuine aspects of your personality to the judgement of the world like that. And because he does that, because he keeps it to himself, he is lonely, which is what drives him to write the letters to begin with.

This story could have fallen into many traps, I suppose, not knowing how or when to make them discover each other’s identities and what to do next… the ending could easily have been rushed. But it’s not. The story is perfect, interesting from beginning to end, and it never ever gets boring.

Cast and crew. Then the director between both leads...

The treatment of emotions in this story is different from what we are accustumed to see… Perhaps I’m just deeply old fashioned, prone to seeing these old holiwood films through romantic lenses, but it seems to me that even when the film talks about solitude and loneliness it is never shallow. After all, Kralik’s loneliness is both what drives him to search for this unique girl and what makes it possible for him to get to know her… It’s not the usual shallow vision of loneliness as a bad thing we have nowadays… And their dedication to their letters is very different from the inconstancy of internet times in which people so easily tire of their pen pals after the first few exchanges, only to get new people the next day – it is so easy after all. For Kralik and Novac, anonymity is a veil lifted slowly, which fuels their interest in one another… In our culture, anonymity has become a way to make people into disposable comodities.

It is possible I suppose that the fact that they were proper letters makes a difference. After all, holding a handwritten letter in your hands, running your fingers through the page, knowing that the other person has held that same page only at an earlier time, that is much more personal than reading an eletronic letter in a computer screen. I suppose that is another point made by the movie… That writing is in itself an artform and that people can fall in love with each other’s words before they even set eyes on one another. That love is a complex thing indeed.

It is also remarkable how the film can keep your interest so much and most of the action happens in a single location (I love how these old movies do that – remember twelve angry men?). As it turns out that happens because the story is actually based on a play. Parfumerie, by Miklos Laszlo, a Hungarian play. That also explains why the film is set in Budapest, even though very little of what happens in the story gives any indication that it’s set in Hungary and not anywhere else (at first I thought there would be something to do with the war, but no, it was simply keeping faithful to the play).

There was even a radio version at Lux Radio Theatre...It must be an experience to listen to an entire movie as if it were a radio show... 

This is my favourite film in this year's 25 days of Christmas so far... Just wonderful

The Shop Around the Corner | Directed by Ernst Lubitsch | Written by Samson Raphaelson, Ben Hecht (uncredited) | James Stewart, Margaret Sullavan, Frank Morgan | 1940