5 out of 5 stars

Sensuality is the most basic pleasure of movies. Young couples went on dates to subsume the unearthly beautiful faces of actors and actresses on the screen. They remember a film not as a ‘Frank Borzage’ or a ‘Leo McCarey’, but a ‘Gary Cooper’ or a ‘Ginger Rogers’, whose elegant symmetry and feeling nourished the erotic consciousness of countless kids, and shaped their aesthetic standards with what they couldn’t obtain. It isn’t every day that you see a Greta Garbo or a Clark Gable, and like the velvet curtains in their bedrooms, the darkness of the cinema house gave them just the sense of privacy they needed. That’s something you couldn’t get from anywhere else: theatre lacked the subjective intimacy the audience shared with what’s on screen, books didn’t have the pictorial immediacy of the emotions, and television wasn’t up to the same scale that aroused and engrossed audience’s senses to the fullest.

But none of it is waxwork. The sex that masqueraded under the garments of romantic passion slipped under the censors’ noses and dealt a blow to the young lovers’ imaginations east and west, with what little the filmmakers had at their disposal, the same way those old film noirs of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler might boil up the threats of violence by terse wit and narrative ingenuity. Since they couldn’t get very far on visual terms under the Hays Code, they had to work it out as well as they could on every other level to make up for it. Such was the paradox that came with censorship and technological limitations: crime thrillers and rom-coms tend to generate more charge and excitement with way less for us to see than when they’re allowed to explore the more graphic possibilities, since the plot contrivances and vivid characters are about all that could be counted on (not unlike the stage), without the effects to mask or divert from their narrative and conceptual weaknesses.

In the comedies of Ernst Lubitsch, ladies and gentlemen of high society came flopping down like fish out of water, with their silk gowns of manners and sexual proprieties all stripped and blown away like thistledowns, leaving naked their infidel passions for our amusement. One of the rare early “auteurs” to be known to the general public for pre-Code farces like Trouble in Paradise (1932) and Design for Living (1933) as well as the more subtly libertine Ninotchka (1939) and To Be or Not to Be (1942), Lubitsch worked by suggestive innuendos and double entendres. He thrived off the restrictions by brewing more allure and danger in the tea than plain pornography where the viewer remains conscious of sex, by the same token that the trigger rarely gets pulled in older private eye cliffhangers, which adds more to when a shot really goes off. His signature style—the European cosmopolitan polish and elegance, baked together with the American wry wit and economical vitality of screenwriter Samson Raphaelson (famously termed “Lubitsch touch” by the PR men)—was a precursor to the comedies of Billy Wilder. To put it in the words of François Truffaut, “In the Lubitsch Swiss cheese, each hole winks…”.

The Shop Around the Corner winks differently and most immaculately; an outlier in his filmography. A choo-choo train to the box office that landed on the wrong foot, a flop in its time like all great Christmas classics, it’s among his least voluptuous and daring, but no less rousing or sophisticated. The setting this time is an ordinary department store down the blocks, rather than nightclubs and mansions. The place is Budapest, Hungary, but it’s more like Strelsau, Ruritania. Margaret Sullavan has got her sprightly urban comic timing down pat. Playing opposite James Stewart for the third time after Next Time We Love (1936) and The Shopworn Angel (1938) (and it won’t be the last) in this war-of-the-sexes enemies-to-lovers office romance, she juggles so wispily with every twist and pull of her face and body, figure skates in her lines with so many grace notes that you scarcely have the time to react to her childish irrationalities as the new salesgirl Klara Novak under Stewart’s Mr Kralik, the clerk who “is like a son to” Mr Matuschek (Frank Morgan), who owns the shop.

Klara and Kralik are the bickering pair who happen to be, unbeknownst to themselves, their secret pen pal lovers (it was remade in 1949 as In the Good Old Summertime and 1998 as You’ve Got Mail). With Sullavan’s naive grace, Klara is so disarmingly despicable that you’re always cutting slack for the spoiled brat who doesn’t know any better. She makes her outrageous pretences seem cute and lyrically cringey, and Kralik has no idea what to do with her when she gets on his nerves.

As Kralik, Stewart is the man of practical reason against Klara the hopeless “romantic”. Sharp and shimmering, the razor-thin-faced ovality under that slicked-back, scintillating hair has its grace. There’s a rhythm and a sheen in his shuffle, with ditches of shadow shading his cheekbones and eyelids. He’s so towering and long he’s devastating even to himself: his arms always afloat in mid-air, he’s always vaguely bending forward as if gravity’s breaking his back. There’s not as much drawl in his parlance as in his later roles, but he’s the only salt-of-the-earth American, Pennsyltucky and all; no better foil for a Trans-Atlantic girl to play love games with. Be on the lookout for girlfriends squealing with excitement when Klara opens her letters in front of Kralik, or when Kralik invents a less-than-ideal version of Klara’s pen pal to taunt her, or when Klara says, after failing to sweet-talk Kralik into letting her go for the night, in her schoolgirl tone “Mr Kralik, I don’t like you.”

There’s no slack in the acting, as in the plotting; Sullavan and Stewart hit all the notes just right where they need to. The pace of their line deliveries is maddening, but it’s part of the burnish (such a fleeting gag as Klara’s “every entrance” might not be as uproarious had it been anyone else in the role). Everything is gripped and tightened like a corset; the rhythm has the stern beauty of Giselle or Stravinsky’s The Firebird. If they’re off by even half a beat, the whole love-hate ambience dissipates. In a way, this is Kubitsch at his most cynical (some sexual improprieties were heavily moralised the way they weren’t in his other films), but the craftsmanship here is no less vigorous. And the moral, that we hurt people who love us when we put up a mean-spirited veneer of superiority to protect our true feelings and hide our insecurities, is also dramatically earned, rather than being painstakingly made into a conscious point. Revelling in its doll-like artifice, it’s an adult fairytale that feels closer to an enclosed world of a snow globe than anything of this Earth, or of any time or era. It’s for the ages.

USA | 1940 | 99 MINUTES | 1.37:1 | BLACK & WHITE | ENGLISH

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Cast & Crew

director: Ernst Lubitsch.
writers: Samson Raphaelson & Ben Hecht (uncredited) (based on the play ‘Parfumerie’ by Miklós László
).
starring: Margaret Sullavan, James Stewart, Frank Morgan, Joseph Schildkraut, Sara Haden, Felix Bressart, William Tracy & Inez Courtney.