The Shop Around the Corner, which recreates Budapest in America and inhabits it with James Stewart and Margaret Sullavan, is a beguiling romantic comedy of pretence and cross purposes, as sweet and light as an Esterhazy honey ball.
David Thomson, A Biographical Dictionary of Film (William Morrow and Company,1976).
The estimable Film Forum showed The Shop Around the Corner (1940) this past week in a lovely, warm 35 mm. print (non-digital, in other words). It is a moving and beautiful film; whether it is funny or not is subjective; I have always felt that the best comedies are not necessarily funny: if Chaplin, Keaton, McCarey and Lubitsch don't make you laugh one can enjoy their films for their beauty and compassion, qualities lacking in the anarchic humor of the Marx brothers, Woody Allen, et al.
There is a dark side to The Shop Around the Corner, as Lubitsch does not venture much beyond the shop itself, full of clerks worried about their paychecks and their security and trying hard to stay in the middle class. One of the employees is having an affair with the boss's wife and this is played more as tragedy than comedy, as the boss tries to kill himself. Unemployed Klara talks her way into a job and feuds with her boss Alfred while they have a lonely-hearts correspondence with each other anonymously, each afraid to meet and be disappointed. Lubitsch emphasizes how our dreams don't always gibe with reality, especially when we are unwilling to "scratch the surface" of others.
William Paul, author of Ernst Lubitsch's American Comedy (Columbia University Press, 1983), said he had to explain to his students why Lubitsch was funny, a futile endeavor indeed. Lubitsch is not necessarily trying to make one laugh, he wants to observe how both mean and generous human beings can be to one another and his intelligent observations and unobtrusive camera are never condescending, as much as we may laugh at human behavior.
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