The Shop Around the Corner
1940 Directed by Ernst Lubitsch
Synopsis
Two employees at a gift shop can barely stand one another, without realising that they are falling in love through the post as each other's anonymous pen pal.
Cast
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I feel like one of those old kooks, a man of the times from the old era of doing things in wanting to use the cliched phrase to begin this review:
"They don't make em' like they use to!"
Not because I am a man, but I have never been a big fan of the Romantic-Comedy sub genre or Rom-com's as they are now popular abbreviated into. The reason for this is about 90% of the ones you see today are nothing more than formulamatic trash that pump out the same cliche and predictable stories. Their only draw to bring in audiences is to always interchange the actors (more like celebrities as the more famous the better, talent not always…
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Ernst Lubitsch's The Shop Around the Corner is a cute little film about not only love but also the build-up of emotion leading to it. Apart from other Lubitsch films like Trouble in Paradise, this story is much more humble, both in setting and character traits, following the lives of a group of workers of a regular street shop. Two of them, Margaret Sullavan and James Stewart, are romantically interested in each other, a feeling they groom by corresponding with each other. The catch is that neither of them know that the other is their dream partner. So we watch as they clash while working together only to sneak somes sighs later on about their "unknown correspondent". Hilarity doesn't ensue,…
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G.O.A.T.
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**Part of the 12 Days of Xmas 2012 project.**
Lubitsch is a genius. The man can work with rapid-fire dialogue, comedy, wonderful character actors, pathos, and darkness. Everyone's operating at the top of their game, especially Jimmy Stewart. And it's lovely to see Frank Morgan break out of the bumbling idiot role he was so often given (and which he performs early in this film).
In a lot of ways, this one is a better film than To Be or Not to Be, a picture I gave 4 stars. Why, then, does this one get the same grade?
Let me tell you a little story. One of my younger brothers -- not the one on this site -- had a…
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So perfectly constructed it can be easy to initially overlook its feeling of spontaneity and human interaction. Even a suicide attempt, framed indirectly by the pop of a light bulb, plays less as black comedy than an impossibly optimistic show of human empathy and interdependence. That its revelation of lovers' identities to each other occurs after all the bright lights have been turned off around them seems so fitting for a film that subtly inverts everything you expect while producing a paragon of generic entertainment.
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Week of Christmas - Film 3
letterboxd.com/sublevel4/list/week-of-christmas/Recommended by ShowBill. While this film is set in the period leading up to Christmas, it isn't really a Christmas film as the use of the festive season seems almost random and is very much restricted to the background until the very end of the film and even then isn't very prominent. Instead it is a romance film and a decent one, but not one that I think I will be wanting to revisit for future Christmases.
Favourite bit: The scene in the Café with the two leads.
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it's a movie from the 50s and a guy has a crush on a girl and oh boy watch out everybody
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Ernst Lubitsch's The Shop Around the Corner is a cute little film about not only love but also the build-up of emotion leading to it. Apart from other Lubitsch films like Trouble in Paradise, this story is much more humble, both in setting and character traits, following the lives of a group of workers of a regular street shop. Two of them, Margaret Sullavan and James Stewart, are romantically interested in each other, a feeling they groom by corresponding with each other. The catch is that neither of them know that the other is their dream partner. So we watch as they clash while working together only to sneak somes sighs later on about their "unknown correspondent". Hilarity doesn't ensue,…
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Learned: best to confuse the person you love in order to woo them. Lovely film.
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So perfectly constructed it can be easy to initially overlook its feeling of spontaneity and human interaction. Even a suicide attempt, framed indirectly by the pop of a light bulb, plays less as black comedy than an impossibly optimistic show of human empathy and interdependence. That its revelation of lovers' identities to each other occurs after all the bright lights have been turned off around them seems so fitting for a film that subtly inverts everything you expect while producing a paragon of generic entertainment.
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First saw this film years ago, still basking in the glow of my beloved TROUBLE IN PARADISE, and somewhat held against this its dissemblance to that. Seeing it now (in 35mm, at that), its own substantial qualities were made abundantly clear, as well as its considerable subversions - made up of only a handful of actual scenes, and incorporating very little (if any?) non-diegetic music, it's stripped down to the way people behave in their environments and around each other. It's also absurdly funny.
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Sentimentality that is both authentic and earnest. Read "Acting Ordinary in The Shop Around the Corner" by film critic George Toles.
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Really nice movie about two people that hate each other in real life but love each other in letter life, without knowing it. Loved to watch the movie that was adapted later into Meg Ryan and Tom Hank's 1998 movie "You've got mail".
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Lubitsch always surprises. He makes movies with such joy, but this film's at its best when the laughs give way to some real serious drama.
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