The Shop Around the Corner

I saw this film for the first time last year and knew then that I had to get the DVD for The Husband. I thought it'd be perfect for him. I found it on DVD in a local store sometime during the year, put it with the Christmas movies, and The Younger Son picked it to watch tonight. They both liked it.

The Shop Around the Corner is a 1940 Ernst Lubitsch film starring Jimmy Stewart, Margaret Sullavan and Frank Morgan.

See why you want to have the DVD by previewing the film online:


Senses of Cinema says:

As William Paul [in Ernst Lubitsch’s American Comedy] observes, “No previous Lubitsch film is so thoroughly interested in the dynamic of a group: where society in the past might have functioned as a restriction on individual desire, this is the first film to posit personality itself as a function of society”

Time has it as one of their best 100 films. EW says it "may be the wisest romance ever put on celluloid". Variety praises it. TCM has an overview. The New York Times says,

So there it is, and a pretty kettle of bubbling brew it makes under Mr. Lubitsch's deft and tender management and with a genial company to play it gently, well this side of farce and well that side of utter seriousness. Possibly the most surprising part of it is the adaptability of the players to Mr. Lubitsch's Continental milieu whose splendid evocation is one of the nicest things of the picture. But they all have become natural figures against a natural background