A Film Canon

 

 

A comedy of written as much as of spoken language, The Shop Around The Corner is effectively a series of epistolary exchanges, structured around the pseudonymous love letters of antagonistic shophands Alfred Kralik (James Stewart) and Clara Novak (Margaret Sullavan). Throughout, Lubitsch ensures that these characters speak written language - especially Alfred, whose ponderous, deliberate register suggests careful mental composition, and results in speech continually congratulated for its precision, eloquence and intelligence. This produces a cerebral romance - a meeting of "beautiful thoughts" - in which Alfred and Clara's real ambition is to treat each other as a surrogate book, as evinced in Alfred's admission that he only experimented with love letters because he couldn't afford a copy of the Encyclopedia Britannica, as well as his insistence that a wallet is the most romantic gift possible, since it presents two pages that can be occupied by the letters and photographs of the beloved. Even the lovers' antagonism is deflected through this precision; or, alternatively, through the penetrating eye for detail characteristic of the best salespeople, which ultimately transcends its antagonistic context: "Although I'm the victim of your remark, I can't help admiring the exquisite way you have of expressing yourself." This is overlaid with a Christmas pathos encompassing financial struggle, the petty frustrations and disempowerments of shop life, and the prospect of loneliness, all of which culminate with shopowner Hugo Matuschek's (Frank Morgan) bittersweet recognition that his stable of shophands are his real family, and their humble microcosm his real home.