Imagine that!
A film constructed from community, not contrivance

THE SHOP AROUND THE CORNER
Directed by Ernst Lubitsch
Starring James Stewart & Margaret Sullavan
Edmonton Film Society
Sept. 9, 8 p.m.
Provincial Museum Auditorium (102 Ave. & 128 St.)
Tickets: $5, $4 Students/Seniors, $2 Children, $25 series membership (8 films)
**** (out of five)

They don’t make movies like this anymore. I mean, some do, but They don’t, and by They I mean the manufacturers of mass-market romances. Pop swooning on the silver screen these days is all overwrought stock emotion, plot contrivance, cheap slapstick, dewy moon-eyes and manipulative music – pornography, really. The Shop Around The Corner presents Romance and Love as integral facets of the whole of human life – Romance as an escape hatch from a world too often small and tawdry, Love as a scarce necessity.

The Shop Around the Corner is generally capsule-described along the lines of "Two shop employees actively dislike each other, neither realizing each is the anonymous romantic pen-pal the other has fallen in love with." I guess that’ll do, but Ernst Lubitsch’s film is so more than that, so much more that the pen-pal gimmick becomes almost secondary. It’s about family, community, trust and betrayal. It’s about work, ambition and opportunity in a recovering post-war economy. Mainly, it’s about people.

Yeah, I know ... what movie, other than movies about dinosaurs or robots or lions or whatever, isn’t about people? You know what I mean. A steadfast, frustrated and yearning Jimmy Stewart dominates, of course, but his relationship with the romantic yet snobbishly cruel Margaret Sullavan is really only marginally more important than, say, his relationship with his boss (Frank Morgan). What The Shop Around The Corner creates is a fully realized human community within which its romance is set. Complications and advancements in the plot spring from the logic of this setting, rather than through idiot coincidence, or Three’s Company-style misunderstanding, or whatever.

Maybe the realism and emotional depth of The Shop Around the Corner is more than usually apparent because the Nora Ephron remake/ripoff of a couple years ago, You’ve Got Mail, was such a pile of sap. With an empty "big corporation versus little guy" theme, a couple of grade-A hams in the lead and a tedious preoccupation with the minutiae of the main characters’ correspondence, You’ve Got Mail was about as warm and human as one of those sad "body pillows."

Even on a simple performance level, there’s no way Ephron’s hackjob can stand up. Meg Ryan’s cute and everything, but Margaret Sullavan is a revelation. The range she exhibits, from pleadingly desperate job-seeker to melodramatically bedridden heartbreak victim, she brings charm and pathos to a frankly unattractive character. Her savage insulting of Stewart is genuinely hurtful, revealing a deeply cruel streak Ryan would reduce to petulance or, more likely, contractually refuse to portray. And anyone who says Tom Hanks is a better actor than Stewart is just plain crazy.