The Shop Around the Corner

To perceive Christmas through its wrapping becomes more difficult with every year. There was a little device we noticed in one of the sporting-goods stores—a trumpet that hunters hold to their ears so that they can hear the distant music of the hounds. Something of the sort is needed now to hear the incredibly distant sound of Christmas in these times, through the dark, material woods that surround it. E. B. White, “A New Package of Energy”

The 81-year-old movie The Shop Around the Corner* is easily one of the least insufferable of the many that are always screened at Christmas – even though it uses Christmas only as a background to its sweet climactic scenes, giving MGM’s set decorators, under the direction of Cedric Gibbons, another chance to show off their considerable skills with chichi. 

The director was Ernst Lubitsch, who had been the most successful director in Europe before he was coaxed by America’s Sweetheart, Mary Pickford, to come to America in 1922 to make movies with her as the star. By the time he made The Shop in 1939 (he insisted on waiting for Margaret Sullavan until she was available), Lubitsch was Hollywood’s leading confectioner. Of all the many foreign filmmakers who moved to Hollywood, either for money or for refuge from war, Lubitsch was by far the most successful, largely because he made films whose aim was to entertain. Considering the number of films, the vast majority in fact, that fail to accomplish this by no means simple ambition, this is saying a great deal. 

Alfred Kralik and Klara Novak work in a leather goods shop in  Budapest. They tell their co-workers (Kralik tells Pirovitch and Klara confides in Ilona) that they each have a pen friend of the opposite sex who is so much more cultivated and refined than the usual sort of people (like Kralik and Klara). Halfway through the film the pen friends plan to meet in a café, until Kralik is fired and can't go through with the meeting. He stands outside the café with Pirovitch hoping to at least see the girl and he discovers that his pen friend is Klara. This love story exists completely on paper – letters passed between two people – until the very end of the film when Kralik fools Klara into believing her pen friend is a Mr. Popkin, balding, with a pot belly, who stole his best line from Victor Hugo, and it’s what makes the film enchanting.  

James Stewart and Margaret Sullavan had a chemistry between them that made them co-stars in four films, including the nearly forgotten The Mortal Storm, released five months after The Shop. Though they look awfully young in The Shop, during shooting Stewart was 31 and Sullavan 30. The film is quite innocently beautiful and has inspired considerable critical logorrhea. Damning with fulsome praise, David Thompson was so moved by the film that he came up with a metaphor he admitted even he didn’t understand: “The Shop Around the Corner may be as sweet and light as an Esterhazy honey ball – whatever that is.” 

A truly great film always yields something new with every viewing, and when you’ve seen a film as many times as I’ve seen The Shop, you begin to look for things you didn’t notice at first. Underneath all the charm and cheeriness and aromatic nostalgia for an old Budapest is something rather topical for our moment. The nightmare of wage slavery, of tyrannical bosses, of unemployment, of the illusion of job security – all of the objectionable aspects of life under capitalism. 

Alfred Kralik has been working in the shop for 9 years, since he was Pepi the errand boy’s age. Yet he’s still only a clerk. When he considers marriage to his pen friend, and asking Mr. Mataschek for a raise, he consults Pirovitch, an older clerk with a wife and children, if he can manage to support a family on a clerk’s salary. 

Kralik: Pirovitch, do you mind if I ask you a personal question? 

Pirovitch: Go ahead. 

Kralik: It’s very confidential… Supposing a fellow like me wants to get married. How much does it cost you to live, you and Mrs. Pirovitch, leaving out the children. 

Pirovitch: Oh, why fool yourself? (he laughs) 

Kralik: Let’s say temporarily – how much it cost? 

Pirovitch: Well, it can be done. And very nicely. Naturally, you cannot be extravagant. 

Kralik: Well, supposing a fellow gets an apartment of three rooms – dining room, living room, bedroom. 

Pirovitch: What do you need three rooms for? You live in the bedroom.

Kralik: Where do you eat? 

Pirovitch: In the kitchen. Get a nice big kitchen. 

Kralik: Where do you entertain? 

Pirovitch: Entertain? What are you, an ambassador? Who do you want to entertain? Listen, if someone is really your friend, he comes after dinner.

This exchange paints a vivid picture of the pinched lives of newlyweds at the very end of the Great Depression. The only difference today is that both spouses have to work. 

When Matuschek suspects his wife of being unfaithful – and of her being unfaithful with Kralik – he becomes an irascible, tyrannical boss. His employees are defenseless against his temper tantrums, which calls into question the very terms that made them so defenseless and Matuschek’s presumed right to be tyrannical. 

But Lubitsch gives us a rather Dickensian happy ending when the boss is foiled in a suicide attempt and at last learns the value of life and friendship. On Christmas Eve his store makes a lot of money and he gives every one of his employees a bonus. Frank Morgan plays Matuschek in exactly the same tone he used to play the Wizard of Oz, changing from a supernatural monster into a kind old teddy bear. He gives out the bonuses exactly as he gave the Scarecrow a diploma, the Tin Man a heart-shaped clock and the Cowardly Lion a medal. In his shop he delivers a speech to his employees: 

This morning when I received the little Christmas tree that you all sent me, I was deeply moved. I read your little note over and over and it made me very happy that you missed me and hoped that I’d be coming back home soon again. You’re right. This is my home. This is where I spent most of my life.

The speech is meant to be heartwarming, I suppose. But it’s actually sad and quite chilling, especially considering how Mataschek’s wife had to seek attention from another man who didn’t spend as much time in the shop. 

One of the stories coming out of Mayfield, Kentucky in the aftermath of the tornado was how employees at a candle factory making candles for Christmas were told by supervisors when they tried to leave the warehouse as the tornado approached that if they left they would lose their jobs. I was reminded of this report when I watched the scene in which Mr. Mataschek tells his six employees that they have to stay late to decorate the store windows. He loses his temper and berates them – but changes his tone entirely when a customer enters the store, and illustrating everything you need to know about capitalism. The one who has the money makes the rules. 

You could argue that Lubitsch wasn’t interested in changing the world. He wanted simply to observe it and derive from the everyday lives of his characters the lineaments of art. Unedifying entertainment at its richest. At this, Lubitsch was a past master, and The Shop Around the Corner makes the word masterpiece clean again. 

*You’ve Got Mail, the Nora Ephron remake, is one of my late sister’s favorite movies, but it is only mentionable as an illustration of How Have the Mighty Fallen. Whose era would anyone rather live in, when all we can come up with is Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan? Ephron’s version improves on the original in only one respect – it isn’t a Christmas movie.