It’s been a decade since I first saw You’ve Got Mail,
the charming Tom Hanks / Meg Ryan film about a pair of bookstore owners
who are fierce competitors in their day-to-day lives but are falling in
love with each other online. For most of that time, my friend Libbie
has been telling me that I really need to see The Shop Around the Corner, the movie of which You’ve Got Mail
is a remake. We finally watched it together this week, and I concur
that it’s a lovely film, and with a Christmastime setting to boot.
Jimmy Stewart
has long been one of my favorite actors, for many of the same reasons
that Tom Hanks is, so it shouldn’t have come as a surprise to me that he
occupied the role Hanks did in You’ve Got Mail. It’s especially
endearing to hear his character, Alfred Kralik, confide to his friend
that he hopes the correspondent with whom he is falling in love isn’t too pretty, since a girl like that surely wouldn’t be interested in a plain-looking fellow like him.
Mr. Kralik is the senior salesperson at the store owned by kindly but
frazzled Hugo Matuschek (Frank Morgan). For the most part, it’s a cozy
work environment, and it helps that Kralik’s best friend, humble family
man Pirovitch (Felix Bressart), is also employed there. True, he does
have to put up with the foppish Vadas (Joseph Schildkraut), whose
superior airs, coupled with his brown-nosing in the boss’s presence, are
grating. But it’s a pretty nice situation for him until Klara Novak
(Margaret Sullavan) shows up. He and Klara don’t get along very well at
all, and most of the blame rests on her shoulders for the animosity she
displays to him. His attempts to be civil are of little consequence.
Little does he know, at least initially, that Klara is the pen pal who
writes to him with such passion and intelligence. When he answered her
ad in the newspaper, he was merely looking to better himself by finding
someone with whom he could expound upon intellectual topics. He hadn’t
counted on falling in love. But by the time they finally agree to meet,
he’s quite smitten, and more than a little worried that he’ll fall short
of her expectations. When a perplexing work crisis immediately precedes
his long-awaited date, it cements his insecurity, leading him to stand
her up, though he intends to send his regrets with Pirovitch. That is,
until Pirovitch takes one look at the woman waiting at a table with a
carnation and announces that she and Klara are one and the same.
As in You’ve Got Mail,
then, it’s the guy who has the upper hand, spending about half the
movie well aware of the identity of his correspondent, while she has no
idea. While his initial reaction is one of indignation, and her
treatment of him when he goes inside to talk to her is deplorable,
there’s a marked change in how he interacts with Klara after that. He is
all kindness and consideration - except when he’s playing mind games
with her in regard to her mysterious correspondent, who has explained
his absence at their date and is back to writing her lengthy, romantic
letters.
You’ve Got Mail replicated this aspect of the
movie fairly faithfully, except that Ryan’s character, while having more
reason to be vitriolic toward Hanks’, never treats him with the
contempt that Klara lavishes upon Kralik. I don’t know that I can blame
Sullavan, who zooms through her lines like the Micro-Machine Man, for
her character’s lack of likeability, but one can’t help thinking that
Klara is getting the better end of the deal. At first, I thought her
rather enjoyably plucky, especially in her creative way of selling a
cigarette case to a woman before she had even secured a position in the
shop, but later, I found some of the barbs she flings at Kralik to be
unnecessarily cruel. I actually found myself thinking of Kate on LOST, particularly in The Moth, when she sneers at Sawyer, who is trying to do something helpful for a change, “You’re actually
comparing yourself to Jack?” Clearly, Klara views Kralik with that same
degree of distaste, while she thinks her pen pal, like Jack, can do no
wrong. As with You’ve Got Mail, I found myself almost forgetting
that Kralik was both people, so different was Klara’s reaction to him on
paper and in person; once I saw her she finally begin to develop some
real affection for the flesh-and-blood Kralik, I bemoaned the fact that
she was still going to choose this mysterious pen pal when such a warm,
wonderful guy was right in front of her.
The movie is probably
at its most fun when Kralik uses his additional knowledge to plant
seeds of doubt in Klara’s mind about the suitability of her secret love.
His teasing is witty, and at times I might even say merciless, but
considering what she’s dished out to him, I think she has a little
emotional distress coming to her. Besides, it’s a clever way to
deconstruct this vision of perfection he won’t be able to live up to and
gradually show Klara that in reality, he is a man worth loving,
whatever his faults may be.
This is a romance, and primarily a
chick flick, I’d imagine, since Jimmy Stewart is so much more
swoon-worthy here than Margaret Sullavan. But it’s also a sweet story of
friendship and apprenticeship. Pirovitch is kind, practical and loyal,
the sort of friend that anyone would want to have. Meanwhile, Mr.
Matuschek, after falsely suspecting his most cherished employee of
grievous misdeeds, comes to realize just how much Kralik means to him
and the extent to which his employees have become his family. In some
ways, the movie is as much about his relationship with Kralik as
Klara‘s, which adds a tender father-son dimension mostly lacking in You’ve Got Mail.
This film came late in the career of director Ernst Lubitsch, who
considered it the movie of which he was proudest. Meanwhile, it’s one of
Stewart’s earlier films; I don’t think I’ve watched any of the movies
he made before 1940, so seeing him at his most youthful was another plus
for me. If you like his performances or if you found You’ve Got Mail as enjoyable as I did, you’ll want to take a peek at The Shop Around the Corner.
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