The Shop Around the Corner
Posted by J on July 5, 2007
Falling in love in Hungary is on par with the idea of falling in love in Des Moines. It’s not exactly Paris, but 
it’s somewhere. The Shop Around the Corner is about falling in love in that dull somewhere, at a time before WWII, when Hungary was still letting capitalists run shops and hiring guys like Jimmy Stewart to manage them.
You have probably come to this movie because you know that it’s the original from which You’ve Got Mail has been cloned. But The Shop Around the Corner has far less charm and consistency than its recent remake, even though this movie is not about people trying to find love on the Internet. Instead, it’s about people trying to find love in a commercial district of Hungary.
That description nails the excitement level of this movie. It’s missing a musical score and the Stanislavsky acting method, which isn’t always needed, but in this case somebody needs to spice up the screen with a reasonable performance. We wondered at the beginning of the movie how the heroine (played by Margaret Sullivan) was reading her character, because she is fairly inconsistent. By the end of the movie we realized that she had no plan. Her character wavers between being deliberately deceptive and innocently perky. It’s as if she’s got multiple personality disorder, which makes the fact that Jimmy Stewart wants to go after her seem bizarre. Meanwhile, Stewart himself looks like he’s working to get through the shoot and earn the paycheck.
There is a fine subplot, involving the Wizard of Oz, as the owner of the store where Stewart and Sullivan work. He feels suicidal thanks to his cheating wife, but there is redemption to be had. His return from despair was the best part of the movie. You will never care so much for a Hungarian entrepreneur.
Entertainment: 3
Intelligence: 6
Morality: 7
