"The Shop Around the Corner" - 1940

“The Shop Around the Corner” (1940) nostalgically shows us the finely delineated everyday moments that are more trying, require more patience and courage, give more delight and a bigger emotional rush than even the most hectic modern countdown to Christmas. Reportedly director Ernst Lubitsch’s favorite film, it is no one wonder, for there is so much of his personally constructed Gemütlichkeit. It begins with the lilting, breezy dance orchestra music we hear at the opening and closing credits.

We’re going shopping this week with a look at the commercial aspect (though incidental) of Christmas as seen through this film, and on Thursday, with “Holiday Affair” (1949).

There are so many charming aspects to “The Shop Around the Corner”, most especially that the minor character actors play major roles, including many beautiful solo moments that compliment the major stars here: Margaret Sullavan and James Stewart.

You’ll remember Felix Bressart from a slew of films, even if you don’t know his name. Here he is the elder shop clerk who assiduously avoids the blustering boss with whom he knows he can’t win, and seems to bring the warmth of his simple home where he is “Papa” to his wife and children, into the gift shop where he and his fellow employees have a kind of second home. We last saw him in this post on “Portrait of Jennie” (1949) where he played the befuddled movie projector operator.

You’ll remember Sara Haden as Aunt Milly from a long parade of Andy Hardy movies. She is the old maid secretary here instead of the old maid aunt. Charles Halton is the detective, also seen in dozens of movies in minor roles, probably you’ll recall him as the bank examiner in “It’s a Wonderful Life” (1946).

William Tracy is a standout as the clownish, clever delivery boy, likable and conniving, who eventually gets a promotion and lords it over the new delivery boy.

The new boy is played by a young Charles Smith, who could tear our hearts out with his gentle innocence and hopefulness.

Josef Schildkraut, who won the Best Supporting Oscar for “The Life of Emile Zola” (1937), continues to prove his versatility as the two-faced sales clerk always trying to stab his fellow employees in the back (we’ve all known them).

There is Frank Morgan, just off “The Wizard of Oz” (1939), who skillfully trades his customary comic confusion for a more dramatic role as the fussy boss, Mr. Matuschek, whose personal anxieties and ultimate near-tragedy affect his entire staff.

All these players make the movie seem like an ensemble piece, where the last shall be first. Still, there is a major plot line for the two stars apart from the goings on in the store.

Especially good in his role is James Stewart, the head sales clerk, a man who must be a buffer between the mercurial whims of the boss, and the helpless junior staff. Mr. Stewart has the ability to play that kind of young man who, while being street-wise and knowing the odds of life are stacked against him, manages to balance his wry pragmatism with a brave idealism that buoys him. He walks a fine line in his relationship with his boss, and with his secret love, a woman he knows only by her letters. We saw recently with “Love Letters” how much can be won, and lost, in precious correspondence and the allure of a well-turned phrase.

Margaret Sullavan plays the newest member of the staff, who cleverly and with chutzpah manages to charm a disinterested lady customer into buying unmovable merchandise, thereby getting herself a job and starting her role as a thorn in the side to James Stewart. They are combative throughout the film, but each has a secret. Eventually, we come to understand that the anonymous pen pal letters they write to prospective sweethearts are actually written to each other.

The story has been remade in several incarnations, including the post here on “In the Good Old Summertime” (1944). But this version has a charm all its own, and I think a good part of it is Lubitsch’s setting the story in Budapest during the Depression. I love the signs all written in Magyar, including our many peeks at the currency tabs on the cash register.

Miss Sullavan, with her Dresden doll features and her precise stage speech with her throaty voice seems to carry the illusion of Europe, as does, ironically, James Stewart. We may see him usually as his “Mr. Smith” icon, the all-American idealist. But there was also something, as mentioned above, of a practical, doubting, soberness to James Stewart’s portrayals, as if he is someone who was fooled once and is determined not to be taken in again. His gentlemanly reserve fits well here in this middle European gift shop.

I love Felix Bressart’s low bows when shaking hands. The Americans and the Europeans in the cast seem to blend well together, without parody.

Made in 1940, while World War II stripped away the independence and the lives of many, many Europeans, we may well guess that this is Mr. Lubitsch’s tribute, and perhaps farewell, to a more peaceful era in Europe. Hitler may have been well forming his plans in the 1930s, but there is still in this movie something decidedly nostalgic, something Habsburgian about this setting. It might be the cigarette boxes that play “Ochi Tchornya” (Dark Eyes), or the courtly shrug of the shoulders attitude that one must make the best of things in this troubled world.

The commercial aspect of Christmas here is gently expressed. Certainly Frank Morgan exhorts, and bullies, his employees into gearing up for the hoped-for Christmas rush. Christmas Eve, a light snow without sleet or the slightest breeze falls on the shoulders of the shoulder-to-shoulder crowd in the street, teased by decorated window displays. Mr. Morgan’s gift shop does the best business since 1928, the last Christmas before the Wall Street crash.

I like James Stewart’s line to Felix Bressart when they discuss the excitement of getting a bonus, the anticipation of opening the pay envelope and wondering how much. “As long as the envelope’s closed, you’re a millionaire.”

We sense the boss is made the happiest when, after inquiring after the Christmas Eve plans of his employees, who all have somewhere to go, his newest staff member, young Rudy, is all alone this night. Boss, alone himself, joyfully invites delivery boy to a first rate restaurant feast as Mr. Morgan learns the true spirit of Christmas, not from ghosts, but by his own errors, his near-tragedy, and his gratitude that life does go on in spite of how much of a mess we make of it sometimes.

If you’ve not seen “The Shop Around the Corner”, TCM is showing it tonight.

Come back Thursday for Robert Mitchum and Janet Leigh in a much larger department store setting in “Holiday Affair”.

Bell, Book, and Candle - 1958

“Bell, Book & Candle” (1958) begins its story on Christmas Eve, carries the plot a few months into the spring, and never really mentions Halloween, but since the story is about a witch, Halloween is never far from our minds.

Kim Novak plays the anthropology major-turned-dealer in native art who lives behind her shop in Greenwich Village. She is the witch, and James Stewart is the publisher she bewitches. Elsa Lanchester, as always, is hysterical as her mischievous and somewhat childlike aunt, also a witch. Jack Lemmon is her mischievous and somewhat sophomoric brother, a warlock. They gather occasionally at a seedy local nightclub to enjoy the company of other witches who are all living a kind of underground life, on the fringes of respectable society, never daring expose who they really are.

Another important supporting role goes to Pyewacket, Miss Novak’s cat. Particularly charming is the bond the two seem to have had. She looks quite comfortable handling him. He sprawls and hangs like a limp towel on her shoulder (mentioned in this previous post on other cat actors), and the way he stretches himself against her body, he certainly seems comfortable with her.

Kim Novak may have taken him for a model for her role, with her slow, feline, graceful, deliberate movements, her penetrating gaze, her casual, low, lazy speech. She does not appear emotionally brittle as she does in her previous films mentioned here, “Picnic” and “Strangers When We Meet”, or “Vertigo”, in which she also started with James Stewart. Here, though her character is complicated and mysterious, she comes off as a much stronger, focused person.


But she is not without her troubles. Miss Novak is bored with her life, and wistfully wonders what it would be like not to be a witch. We are told that witches cannot blush, or cry, or fall in love, and that if they ever did fall in love, they would lose their powers. Novak wonders what it would be like to be in love.

On Christmas Eve at the local witch dive, she confesses her Christmas depression (which might make her more human after all), and ruminates, “Don’t you ever wish we weren’t what we are -- that you could spend Christmas Eve in a little church listening to carols instead of bongo drums?”


She takes a fancy to upstairs neighbor James Stewart, and when she discovers that his fiancée is her old college nemesis, played razor sharp and elegant by Janice Rule, the kind of girl who led the clique and ostracized the losers, Miss Novak decides all’s fair in love and war. She goes after him.


As part of her plan, she casts a spell on an author that publisher Stewart wants to meet. That author, a charlatan investigating witchcraft, is played by the one-of-a-kind Ernie Kovacs, with his customary dizzy alcoholic logic. She casts a spell on Stewart, and one of the most memorable scenes is their Christmas morning adventure on the top of New York’s Flatiron Building. When he tosses his hat off the roof of the building, we watch is sublimely sail several stories until it slaps into the slush on 5th Avenue.


Complications ensue when her brother Jack Lemmon decides he’s tired of being poor and starts to feed real information on witchcraft to Ernie Kovacs to cash in on his book that Stewart will publish. Novak nixes this project as too dangerous to their community, and Lemmon gets his revenge when Novak is forced to confess to Stewart that she is a witch and that she had cast a spell on him.



It takes a little convincing, but eventually the light dawns and Jimmy is horrified, angry, and humiliated (his reactions are very funny). He seeks a counter spell from another local witch, played with glorious self importance by Hermione Gingold.

But we have our happy ending when Kim Novak, in spite of herself, really has fallen in love and as a result, blushes, cries, and loses her powers. And her cat. Stewart decides he really is in love too, without the spell.

Taken from John van Druten’s stage play, much of the playful language teases us with the bewitching power of sex. Novak scolds Elsa Lanchester for the pranks she plays and forbids her to use her witchcraft because she cannot be “discreet.”

Jack Lemmon, she tells Stewart, uses his powers to enhance his love life. Elsa Lanchester tells Stewart that witches cannot fall in love, “Love is quite impossible. Not hot blood, though. Hot blood is quite allowed, but of course,” she lowers her eyes, “you know all about that.”


There are other playful remarks that gesture to the history of witchcraft (or rather, suspicion of witchcraft) in America. Elsa Lanchester confides to Stewart that both Novak and Lemmon were witch prodigies as children, “We lived in Massachusetts.”

And, when Stewart, seeing that she has a confession to make and teasing her to just come out with it says, “Have you been engaging in un-American activities or something?”

To which Novak grimly replies, “No, I’d say very American. Early American.”

Obviously, this film was a huge inspiration for the successful television sitcom “Bewitched” which followed in the 1960s and early ‘70s. (Speaking of which, have a look here at this post on the Samantha statue in Salem, Mass. on my New England Travels blog.)

It’s interesting how many words we have to denote love that come from a mystical lexicon: bewitching, enchantment, magical, casting spells. Perhaps Stewart is right when he says, embracing Novak at last, “Who’s to say what magic is?”