by Samson Raphaelson (screenplay) and Miklós László (play )
Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM)
Sarah: MOVIE TIME!
Elyse: Just starting the movie
Carrie: It’s hard to see and hear the movie with this overweight cat sitting on my face with his nose in my ear.
Elyse: I’m curious as to why they chose to set the movie in Budapest
Redheadedgirl: Because the play it’s based on was.
Carrie: It’s based on a play set in Budapest – although I also was surprised they didn’t change it.
Elyse: Ah ok
Sarah: I had the thought as the credits rolled that when this movie premiered (1940) a great many if not all of the audience knew where Hungary was due to WWI and the WWII. Now, with the audience watching in 2016, I wondered if that would be as widely true. I am guessing not (I had to ask Google to confirm that Hungary was west of Austria, to my own shame).
Carrie: “That’s a very interesting combination of poetry and meanness.” Yes, yes it is.
Redheadedgirl: Hashtag life goals
Sarah: Poetry and meanness is a very perplexing but curious life goal
Carrie: It’s not mine.
Redheadedgirl: It’s being able to craft the perfect insult that’s evocative and beautiful and devastating.
Y’all already know I’m not the nice one
Sarah: People who think Aaron Sorkin characters talk fast need to listen to Margaret Sullivan and Jimmy Stewart arguing.
Carrie: And Miss Novak, I hate to tell you this, but that blouse really is awful.
Elyse: Also her dress with the X on the front is the least flattering thing ever. “Let’s really separate the boobs!”
Redheadedgirl: It was a thing? Happily it stopped being a thing?
Carrie: Her clothes are deliberately awful according to IMBD. Like, the director made her buy a dress off the rack and then had the costume people wash it and dry it so it would fit wrong. And I must say, they nailed, “I want to be fashionable but I suck at it plus I have no money.”
Sarah: Can we bring vests back? I like vests.
Adam (Sarah’s Hubby): No. I dislike vests very much.
Carrie: Oh and Sarah I used to wear vests all the time. They rock. Bring them back.
Redheadedgirl: As is often the case, Adam, you are wrong. Vests are hot.
And a dude in a vest with his sleeves rolled up? UNF.
Sarah: I will tell you, he looks really hot in a vest, too. *Not at all biased, no not in the least*
Redheadedgirl: I believe you.
Sarah: And sock garters. Now that’s a hot look.
Carrie: Klara, you dingbat, are you saying that you draw a line ay bowlegged? Seriously, girl.
Elyse: The bow legged/sock garter thing was confusing.
Carrie: She’s trying to decide if he’s hot or not, another reason I am annoyed by her.
Elyse: SOCK GARTERS ARE NEVER HOT, KLARA
Carrie: WORD
Mr. M and the new delivery boy going to dinner together was just about the sweetest thing in the history of ever.
Sarah: I’m so charmed. The charm is effectively working on me and I’m happily ensconced in all the charm.
Elyse: “How much is this belt in the window marked $2.95?”
“$2.95…”
I WORKED RETAIL AND THIS SHIT HAPPENED ALL THE TIME.
My personal fav was when a customer asked me “Do you have that blue book I saw at the Denver airport last week? I don’t know the title or author or what it was about but it was blue and someone in Denver was reading it.”
Carrie: Oh yeah
Elyse:
Carrie: I used to be a radio DJ part time (in Alaska, it was a thing) and people would call and say “Can you play this song, I don’t know what it is or who it’s by or what the words are but it goes like ‘da na na’”
Redheadedgirl: I once had a dude in Borders come in and go “There’s this book, Oprah had it on her show like five years ago? Maybe seven?”
But I got the book based on that though.
Elyse: I like how everyone has to stand out in the cold until the owner shows up to let them in.
Carrie: I think this movie does a great job nailing some of the details of working retail and most of those details haven’t changed all that much.
Although you can’t get a belt for $2.95 anymore!
Elyse: Jesus, this movie is dark. Totally was not expecting attempted suicide.
Redheadedgirl: No, but it’s in every Jimmy Stewart movie I’ve ever seen.
Elyse: Isn’t that one other movie?
Carrie: I’ve seen a lot of Jimmy Stewart movies and they don’t all involve suicide.
Redheadedgirl: …yes
Carrie: Not a helpful sample size, RHG.
Elyse: Question for the group: Jimmy Stewart, hot or not?
Redheadedgirl: Here, yes.
It’s a Wonderful Life, NO.
Carrie: Not…except that he is very good at conveying sexual desire which suddenly makes him hot.
When he’s sharing the phone with Mary in It’s a Wonderful Life – hot. End of this movie: hot. Generally: no.
Redheadedgirl: In It’s a Wonderful Life he plays a Giving Tree, and that’s not hot, that’s just sad.
Elyse: When Ms. Novak insults him at the coffee shop he looks like he wants to take her right on the table
Redheadedgirl: Right.
Elyse: Seriously. RIGHT ON THE TABLE.
Yeah, this movie is a really good example of how not to fire someone.
Carrie: Labor laws seem to have altered considerably I must say. Elyse, I bet right now everyone in your HR department is getting a terrible headache and they don’t know why.
But we do… they sense the disturbance in the force…
Elyse: I would super uncomfortable with my boss sitting and talking to me while I was lying there
In bed, I mean.
Carrie: I like the idea that if you have a bad break up you can take time off from work and lie in bed in a beautiful nightie while people wait on you and shower you with sympathy.
I am not liking our Miss Novak so far. But Pepi is fabooo! I think my problem with Miss Novak is her aim. I don’t see Kralik doing or saying much that should inspire the kind of vitriol she throws his way.
Elyse: I’ll be honest, I really don’t care for Klara.
I don’t think they did a good enough job of explaining why she and Alfred butt heads and so her attacks feel unwarranted
Carrie: Same, although at the very end it’s largely explained.
Elyse: We get her justification later but it’s too late in the film.
Carrie: But it’s weird they hold off on that explanation for long – I thought she was much too mean.
Sarah: Really, they are so unkind to each other. And I find myself questioning the influence of sexism on my reaction to their reaction. Of course she *should* respond with equal degree of insult instead of just accepting it with false serenity and “niceness.” Of course she should respond to his negging with the same.
Carrie: It’s not like she’s standing up for herself, which would be awesome – she just lashes out at random. She’s very naive and she seems very young and alone in the world, and realizing that made me warm up to her considerably.
I think a big message of the movie is about the difference between idealized romance and real love with a flawed human. Interestingly Anna Karenina and Madame Bovary, both of which are mentioned, have heroines who die because they can’t reconcile their idealized version of romance with the real world. Klara read the books but didn’t understand what they were actually about. And Crime and Punishment is also about the difference between truth and fiction, ideas and real life.
Elyse: I did like the end though.
Carrie: Yeah, I’m a sucker for that ending.
Sarah: I was charmed by the first two thirds for sure. but I don’t think the end was as satisfying as it could have been.
Carrie: I don’t have a ton of deep thoughts about the movie possibly because I was suffocated by a cat most of the time. But some of those lines are wonderful. “Psychologically I’m very confused but personally I’m very happy!” That’s my life goal, right there.
Sarah: I love the idea of two people knowing one another on a superficial level, with regular largely meaningless conversation, while also corresponding with one another honestly and revealing their true selves over time.
That’s a total catnip lure for me. Being yourself with someone is so difficult. Venues that make that conversation happen beneath superficial conversations are delicious.
The balance – or imbalance- of reaction to insults is really interesting. Kralik insults Ms. Novak just as thoroughly as she does him, targeting appearance, manners, all sorts of unkind things. She reacts by straightening her spine and firing back. He looks like she just hit him and his face collapses a little bit when she does. So I find myself sympathizing with him more, because he lets it show for a minute that what she said hurt, while she reacts very quickly, shows little reaction, and fires back in kind.
Carrie: It’s fun to see another comedy that relies so much on the rivalries and friendships of co-workers.
Sarah: I love the contrast between Matuschek believing false information about Kralik, and Kralik believing two things about the same person, and Novak, too. What you think, and what you know, and what you think you know are all different.
Redheadedgirl: Girl!Roommate came home at the last 20 minutes or so when I was watching, and she frowned and said, “If he catfishing her?” Which…not really, because catfishing implies a level of intent and this just happened by accident.
Carrie: He is at the end a bit.
Sarah: He does spend the last third of the film catfishing her.
To his credit he starts acting a lot kinder, but her turn around at the end, largely based on his report of “other dude’s” appearance, then revealing himself, came too fast for me to entirely embrace it.
Redheadedgirl: However, this plot as writ wouldn’t work tonight, because all the dating websites strongly encourage pictures.
And no picture, no messages.
THAT SAID…
If you have them be co-workers that are at different sites and they never see each other but only have to deal with each other on the phone and email, but get matched on Tinder or whatever, that could be a fun inversion.
Sarah: Stories like this are why the Rainbow Rowell book Attachments worked so well for me, too. Peeking at true self, dual levels of knowing someone.
I can see a contemporary version happening with Craigslist and false email addresses that don’t tie to an easily-Google-able name.
Carrie: Weirdly, I would be cool with almost any grade. Prob a B. It was a nice movie. It didn’t rock my world and yet it had great charm and a real sense of this sort of slightly dysfunctional workplace family, which I’m a suck for.
Sarah: The end isn’t as strong as the beginning – which was delightful – so I agree with Carrie. B from me.
Elyse: B
Redheadedgirl: B+. I was delighted by it, and yeah the ending was rushed but I mostly did not care.
It was charming. And a lot of fun.
Carrie: Yes it was!
What about you? Did you watch The Shop Around the Corner? Jimmy Stewart – hot or not? What did you think about the possible catfishing element? Could this work with a modern twist?
I tried twice, but I couldn’t get into this movie. *shrug* It probably has more to do with rom-coms not really being my thing¹, but I was just kinda bored.
¹I think I own, maybe, four out of a couple hundred dvds.
It’s funny you ask if it could work in modern times- it was remade as You’ve got mail back with meg Ryan and tom hanks.
Right! And yet when I think of that movie, it doesn’t seem as close to the original. There’s no forced proximity in the workplace,and his business forced hers out. In my (very weird) memory, it’s sort of a remake but more of a ‘based on’ retelling.
I’ve loved Shop Around the Corner since I was a kid, but I capital-H Hated You’ve Got Mail. It didn’t have the familial aspect of all the coworkers at Matuschek and Company and I wasn’t a fan of Hanks doing a role Stewart had so nailed as a romantic lead. While Stewart could, as you pointed out, be very attractive in certain roles, I’ve never gotten that vibe from Hanks at all.
My favorite line from this film, when he’s trying to dissuade her from buying one of the music boxes he hates and get a wallet instead, was “he has your picture on one side and your latest letter on the other and that’s all the music he needs”. I SWOON
Yes, I think he is hot.
I still need & w as not to do a re-watch of this movie.
It took me two tries to rewatch the Shop Around the Corner–I guess I have to be in the right mood for that stylized 1940s dialogue. I liked it OK, but didn’t love it–agree with the B grade.
The Hungarian setting was weird and a little distracting, given that the older actors all had accents and the younger ones did not. Plus, in 1940, there would have been this extra layer of nostalgia given that Europe was entangled in WWII by then.
I had forgotten the suicide attempt plotline–that was much darker than I expected.
Liked Jimmy Stewart, didn’t mind Klara (although I was grateful that we got an explanation of why she was so rude in person and pleasant (apparently) in her letters), hated Pepi. The shop owner having Christmas dinner with the new messenger boy charmed me.
For extra credit, I also rewatched You’ve Got Mail. Interestingly, I hated that movie when it first came out, particularly the fact that Tom Hanks’ character wrecked the livelihood of Meg Ryan’s and never really apologized for it. As I have gotten older, my perspective has changed and I like it better–although part of it is knowing that a big chain like Fox Books would probably have fallen to Amazon a la Borders and Barnes and Noble, so the Joe Fox character was eventually going to go through the same developments as Kathleen. I do love the YGM version of the cafe scene where Jimmy Stewart/Tom Hanks realizes who his correspondence partner is. It takes an actor with some chops to play all the layers of what is going there, and both Stewart and Hanks have got them.
Add me to the Jimmy Stewart is definitely hot camp. Carrie’s observation, “he is very good at conveying sexual desire which suddenly makes him hot” nails it for me.
In It’s a Wonderful Life and Philadelphia Story, which are both flawed movies (that I love nonetheless), a few of his scenes burn up the celluloid.
I always get the title of this film mixed up with Little Shop of Horrors.
Umm. Hungary is EAST of Austria.
I’m a huge sucker for old movies, so I have to say I love the film even with its imperfections lol. You know, I was going so say yes Jimmy Stewart is totally hot, but then Carrie’s “Not…except that he is very good at conveying sexual desire which suddenly makes him hot” observation made me unsure. I’ll have to watch it again with that in mind.
@Janine – I had the same feeling rewatching You’ve Got Mail recently. I was much less upset about him putting her out of business because I knew what would happen to his big box bookstore – and I realised he didn’t actually put her out of business, the economy changed. But I still hated, hated, hated him for lying to her.
I truly love this movie; James Stewart is indeed hot; and Frank Morgan gives a genuinely beautiful performance as Mr. Matuschek. It’s an A grade for me.
This pseudo-European setting was a carryover from operetta. Then hire one or actors with vaguely foreign accents to provide some color. I loved this movie as a teen – bickering as foreplay- but as I’ve aged I find it harder to accept. Clara is really unbalanced and downright mean to Stewart’s character.
How about a viewing of Taming of the Shrew with Taylor and Burton?
I’ve never seen Little Shop – somehow I missed it during my serious Jimmy Stewart phase. And I hated You’ve Got Mail so much that I had no interest in seeing the movie that inspired it. Reading this review it seems like it’s not as similar as I thought, so maybe I want to see it – but it still includes the lying part that I really hated, so I don’t know.
I definitely thought that Tom Hanks was cat fishing Meg Ryan in YGM and it made me hate him.
Jimmy Stewart. Sigh. I went through a very intense Jimmy Stewart phase as a teen. To the point that I got in an argument with some random male acquaintance who tried to argue me out of my admiration because of Stewart’s conservative politics (this was in like 1989 and 19 year old me really didn’t have a good answer, but I’ve come up with few good responses in the intervening years).
I’m not sure I ever saw him as hot, but I really liked his persona in movies like Mr Smith Goes to Washington and Harvey and I far preferred him to other, supposedly sexier, stars of his era who just came across as smarmy and gross to me. Favorite moment – I ran into a high school friend at a theater that played old movies. She asked if I was going to see the Cary Grant movie and I was like, no I’m here for the Jimmy Stewart movie. And of course it was the same movie.
@cleo – let me amend my catfishing statement. I don’t believe Tom Hanks set out to be dishonest, but he did spend the last 1/3 of the movie lying / catfishing.
I’ve never seen the movie, but “She Loves Me,” the musical based on the original play is sheer joy and I’must bummed I can’tell get to NY to see the current Broadway production.
Clips of the 1993 revival:
http://youtu.be/uyRqRjjE54U
http://youtu.be/SKvh1PPwUL0
I adore old movies, especially romances. If you want to see A TOTALLY GREAT old romance, watch Ingrid Bergman and Cary Grant (sigh) in Alfred Hitchcock’s SUSPICION. It’s just fabulous and holds up very well, IMO.
I personally loved the store and the minor characters and the general ambience of this movie, but I HATED Margaret Sullivan’s character who was waaaayyy too nasty for waaaayy too long. It spoiled the movie for me.
@Lynda X:
I think you might be confusing actors/movies. Do you mean Suspicion with Cary Grant and Joan Fontaine or Notorious with Cary Grant and Ingrid Bergman? Both are Hitchcock, and Notorious is the one with the kissing scene. 😉
Regarding this movie, as much as I love, and have expressed my love in the comments for the original post, I usually watch it around Christmas. Since I own it in one of my online video libraries, I’ll have to watch it, and give it the analytical treatment you guys have. And my opinion is that James Stewart is definitely hot. He seems to have been a genuinely good person besides, which makes me like him better.
I first saw the Judy Garland/ Van Johnson musical remake The Good old Summertime (odd title for a movie that doesn’t take place in the summer). I liked that remake but prefer The Shop Around the Corner, there is just something about it that gets me every time I see it.
@carolinareader Love The Good Old Summertime!
It seems like I was the only one who really didn’t care for this movie. First off, where the hell were all the Nazi’s? In 1940, WWII was already 2 years in and Hungary would have been crawling with Nazis.
I also wanted to smack Klara so often. She didn’t receive a letter from her pen pal for a couple of days, so she made herself so sick that she collapsed at work? She was so damn shallow. No bow legged people. No overweight people. The guy had to have a good job. Ugh. She didn’t want a husband, she wanted someone to take care of her–she might has well have called herself a whore.
Finally, this movie was far too short. The main reason I don’t like Klara is because we only ever see things through Jimmy Stewart’s POV. I would have loved to see things through Margaret Sullivan’s eyes. I think I might be more sympathetic towards her if I got to see the world through her eyes as well as through his. You’ve Got Mail does a great job of this. We get Meg and Tom’s POV, so we can understand where they’re both coming from and how that informs their current situation.
As for the hotness of Jimmy Stewart, I agree that he was very good at depicting desire. I love the scene in Its a Wonderful Life where George and Mary are listening to Sam on the phone and you can just feel how much they want each other. Personally, I think he is the most physically attractive in Rear Window.
I adore this movie, as well as She Loves Me (it’s musical version). It’s a jewel, shiny and lovely and precious.
I never liked the Tom Hanks character in You’ve Got Mail. At the final scene I was anticipating the fireworks as she lights into him for lying to her, then he has to do some serious groveling before she forgives him. Instead she just smiles at him and says “I was hoping it was you.” THE END.
That’s it? No apology for lying? They don’t even mention it, just pretend it never happened? I turned to my husband and said, “I’d have decked him.”
Also, am I the only one whose mind went straight to the gutter when at the end she asked if she could see if he was bow legged? But then again, Ernst Lubitsch was known for writing and directing some of the best pre-code comedies out there, so I could see him trying to tweak the noses of the movie sensors, metaphorically speaking. If you don’t know what pre-code refers to, it’s basically an era when there was a code for the movie industry to follow, but it wasn’t enforced. This lax enforcement lasted from 1930 to about 1934, when movie producers had to follow a list of what was acceptable to show or mention in movies. This code lasted until the 1960’s when it was replaced by our current rating system with the letters for each level of movie, G, PG, and R fore example.
@scifigirl1986: Granted, I may have missed something since I didn’t watch the whole thing, but the movie wasn’t nesseccarily set in 1940, just because it was released that year.
I haven’t seen this one and probably won’t because bitchy heroines go nowhere with me. There was a thing, I think, with American-made movies trying to convey what Ngaio Marsh once called the “caressing rudeness” of courtship in the educated English upper class of the 1930s. It doesn’t come off very reliably with American actors/writers/directors. You catch a bit of it with Astaire/Rogers, who personally had some friction but also had absolute trust and appreciation of each other.
Re: Jimmy Stewart sexy: oh yeah. Tall, intelligent, courtly and repressed. LOL “Rear Window” all the way.
One of my favorite movies! Workplace politics, workplace banter, the one-liners (“I think people who like to smoke candy and listen to cigarettes will love it” in response to the horrible music box is one of my faves)…I could go on. Yes, Klara is a bit bitchy, but I can overlook that because…Jimmy Stewart…*le swoon*
Re: the setting. I was always under the impression that this movie takes place in the early 1930’s, during the Great Depression. There’s at least one reference to this being a bad time to be out of a job, not to mention Klara’s desperation to find employment.
Me: hitting my head, with “Dah” on my lips. Thanks, Stefanie Magura, for pointing out that I meant “Notorious.” Great, great movie. “Suspicion”: dated, and not so great (but worth watching anyway).
James Stewart hot or not hot? Never thought about it, which says so much. Tall, skinny and nice? Is that ever hot? Then I remembered Paul Henreid in Casablanca. Tall, skinny, nice with PASSION. He was definitely hot.
I actually love “You’ve Got Mail”- it contains a lot of elements that I find total catnip (including the “you hate me but love my alter-ego, so now I have to figure out what to do….”). I actually just went and tracked down “Shop Around the Corner” after this review, and I did not like it nearly as well. Part of it is that Klara really does seem very clueless, and doesn’t have an actual good reason to start being mean to her co-worker, but part of it is that I am not as fond of a lot of the supporting cast. “YGM” has such great characters around the two main characters. I also really like the way that e-mail and chatting make it possible for the characters to have what felt like a more personal discussion- not just corresponding about culture and literature
(also definitely approve of replacing “Anna Karenina” with “Pride and Prejudice”!). When, immediately after being mean to Kathleen, Joe goes online to talk (to her) about how he was mean, and he knew it, and he sometimes feels like he’s become the worst version of himself- and then to have Kathleen be able to tell him later that he was right, she finally had thought of the perfect insult and said it (to him) and felt horrible…. to me, that really felt like they were building a relationship and setting things up for later developments.
Right, I know what I’m re-watching next….
@Jane Drew:
See…I really liked the supporting cast in Shop. I guess as the old saying goes “Different strokes for different folks.”
There’s also a musical based on this play called “She Loves Me” Barbara Cook played Ms. Novak in the original production in the early 60’s. Laura Benanti is currently playing the role on Broadway (SQUEEEE) and Zachary Levi is playing opposite her (off). The musical is magical and lovely and full of charm! Also see: In the Good Old Summertime with Judy Garland as the Ms. Novak-type role.
I’m a sucker for all those old movies made by European refugee directors.
This one, I’ve occasionally gotten confused with “The Shop on Main Street”, which is set in Czechoslovakia during WW2, but it’s about the Nazi occupation and very sad.
Did anyone notice that the musical “She Loves Me” is a remake of this and that Zachary Levi fills the Jimmy Stewart role? Love.
This comment is super late, but I finally got to watch both this and in the Good Old Summer Time during this year’s TCM Christmas movies marathon. Summer Time was on my to be watched list, to the point that I had purchased, and hadn’t gotten around to it. I suspect that people who liked Shop will like Summer Time. Like Jimmy Stewart and Margaret Sullavan, Van Johnson and Judy Garland have good chemistry, and while there aren’t many, Garland gets to sing some great songs in this version including songs of the period in which the movie is set. Plus we also see some great comic gags which were devised by Buster Keaton, who has a character part in the film as one of the shop workers. One of these in the beginning is when Van Johnson accidentally but thoroughly destroys Judy Garland’s outfit, and gives her his business card when he attempts to apologize. At least here you can see where her enmity begins. I thought this was handled better than in Shop. The shop in this movie is a musical instruments store and it takes place in early 1900’s Chicago. Much of the dialogue from Shop was also used in Summer Time. This is where I think Shop was more effective. As you can guess with my mention of the comic gags from Buster Keaton, I particularly liked that Summer Time ditched the misunderstanding and the resultant attempted suicide subplot, something I thought was well-handled, but was a bit of a dark note, and made the misunderstanding one which was important, and had the same initial and later outcome but much lighter in tone. This truly made the movie a comedy. Spoiler alert: Our shop-owner in this one has long been in love with his secretary, and wants to propose to her by playing his violin, but everyone but him seems to know how dreadful he is at playing it and it isn’t until he hears it played beautifully that he gets it. That’s where the misunderstanding arises. If you like checking out the supporting casts especially of these older movies, I think you’ll like both. And since I have already gone on long enough, I’ll end my review, but I wish the smart bitches movie club had covered this one. That’s one feature I miss even if I never ended up watching the movies.
I just realized that I made it look like I had never seen Shop around the Corner, when I have several times. What I hadn’t seen was In before was In the Good Old Summer Time, which meant my first time watching this movie was also my first time watching both within a short time period. This allowed me to effectively compare and contrast.