love’s balance
by Douglas Messerli
Samson
Raphaelson and Ben Hect (screenplay, based on the play Parfumerie by Miklós László), Ernst Lubitsch (director) The Shop Around the Corner / 1940
If
there was ever example of what described as the “Lubitsch touch,” the magical ability
to combine drama and gentle comedy, it is his 1940 film The Shop Around the Corner. Beginning with the rather ordinary
comedy, Parfumerie, which I describe
above, Lubitsch and his writers switched the location of a kind leather goods/gift
shop, now called Matuschek’s, where the top salesman is Alfred Kralick (James
Stewart), working under Hugo Matuschek (the wonderful Frank Morgan) and with several employees, Pirovitch, Vadas, Flora, Ilona and Pepi,
portrayed by wonderful studio regulars such as Felix Bressart, Joseph
Schildkraut, Sara Haden, Inez Courtney, and William Tracy.
To create dramatic intensity writers
Raphaelson and Hecht unweave the two twines of plot, beginning the story—unlike
in the original play—without Kralick’s love-hate interest, demonstrating that
something is already amiss in the store through Matuschek’s sudden irritation
with his senior employee before introducing
Klara Novak (Margaret Sullivan), in search of a job.
Although the store has no current positions,
she gets a job by selling a ludicrous cigarette box that plays “Ochi Chërnye”
every time it’s opened, which Kralick had been against carrying in the store.
Kralick, accordingly, is suddenly hit from two sides, with the slowly growing
irritation by his boss and the boiling hostility of his new co-worker.
Behind Matuschek’s growing displeasure is
his suspicion that his wife has been having an affair with his senior salesman.
And when he discovers, through a private detective, that his wife’s lover is
not Kralick but a fellow salesman, Vadas—who, it is made clear throughout, is a
dislikeable being—Matuschek attempts suicide, but is saved by the errand-boy
Pepi.
Here again, moreover, Lubitsch and his
writers carefully balance this truly dark element with the necessary return of
Kralick to the shop and the busy hustle and bustle of the Christmas season in
which the play takes place. In short, every darker aspect of his tale is
counterbalanced with a lighter, romantic or comedic event. So does Kralick’s
return send Klara to bed with a fever, but now, received with worry and caring
from her former nemesis, her illness again allows a gradual shift in their
relations to take place, as the two grow warmer and warmer in their feelings
for each other at the very moment when, on Christmas eve, the store racks up
more sales than ever before. In a very capitalistic spirit, accordingly,
romantic love is here equated with financial gain, just as previously a great
deal of the discussion about marriage throughout concerns issues regarding whether
or not Kralick can afford to get married. A Christmas bonus from now divorced
Matuschek (in the original play he remains married), obviously, helps in that
matter! And his now lonely position, as he heads off for dinner with the new
errand boy, Rudy, is a bittersweet counterbalance for the joyous holiday all
the others now face.
The most troubling aspect of both play
and film (and even the later musical) is that Kralich waits so long before
revealing to Klara that he is her correspondent. But in the film, as well, Stewart’s
portrayal of him, at times, seems similarly despicable, not only because of the
lies he tells to Klara about meeting her pen pal, but in his reactions to and
later firing of the piece’s villain, Vadas. Vadas may be a home wrecker and a
rake, but he, in the end, far more charming than Kralick as played by Stewart
throughout. Stewart’s rambunctious bellowing is matched only by the adenoidal whining
of Pepi, the work’s singular comic figure. Only in the final moments of the
movie, when quietly revealing that he is Klara’s secret lover, does Stewart
redeem himself, playing a role closer to the love-stricken Scottie he would
later play in Hitchcock’s masterpiece, Vertigo.
Otherwise, as I noted in the first
paragraph of this short remembrance, The
Shop Around the Corner is the embodiment of the director’s “magic touch.” We
watch it every Christmas at our house.
Los Angeles,
Christmas Eve, 2013
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