James Stewart and Margaret Sullavan’s love-hate romance, which spawned many later meet-cutes, is more eccentric than you might remember
Ernst Lubitsch’s 1940 romcom classic is re-released: it stars James Stewart and Margaret Sullavan as the two squabbling shop assistants, Alfred and Klara, who are anonymous romantic penpals falling in love without knowing who the other really is and who in real life can’t stand each other. It’s a parallel universe situation that effectively takes the dislike/love duality of the meet-cute scenario and perpetuates it through almost the entire drama.
The Shop Around the Corner is based on the Hungarian stage play Parfumerie and keeps the Mitteleuropa setting of elegant Budapest: strange to think that this film was appearing just as Hungary was joining the war, on the wrong side. It inspired many remakes, most famously the Tom Hanks/Meg Ryan weepie-romance update You’ve Got Mail in 1998 – with emails instead of letters – which shifted the action to
New York. (My own personal theory is that the original’s ensemble set-up, with its gallery of shop assistants and a venerable father-figure boss, inspired the
BBC TV
comedy Are You Being Served?)