The Shop Around the Corner

The story of several people caught in a series of misperceptions of each other. Klara and Alfred are anonymous pen pals falling in love, and also co-workers in a leather goods shop who dislike each other (the dislike originating primarily with Klara, a seemingly unmotivated dislike whose origin is only explained in the final scene). The owner of the shop, Matuschek, suspects his wife and Alfred of having an affair; really the affair is with another employee, Ferencz. Complications ensue, with the jealousy, suffering, vanity, and awkward morality of Matuschek given surprising emphasis aside the lead plot of star-crossed lovers. It is all set in Budapest between the wars, a setting giving little elaboration aside from the names of the characters. It is a strange setting (and one announced in a title card), since we are made to sympathize with characters who are warm and alive, in a warm lively atmosphere, yet knowing that in a few years’ time this will all be swept away. The pact between artist and audience is broken from the start, especially odd given how vigorously and successfully the movie works to honor said pact in all of its other particulars.

We are given a sense of how the status of the various characters is all tangled in knots. Matuschek is rich but needy; Klara is incredibly precarious (she comes to Matuschek’s after leaving previous jobs, it is implied, because of sexual harassment), yet perhaps the most confident in her own worth. Alfred seems to have the moral high ground towards them both, but is the most calculating and deceptive character in the film aside from the villainous Ferencz. They are all kept in tension, rising and falling comparatively in complex ways. The firmest constant is that of the priority of capital. Matuschek is petty bourgeoisie, but the fact that he owns the store sets a huge gulf between him and his staff. He eats what he wants to eat; when he is sick he is cared for by state-of-the art medical technology (a Germanic psychiatrist who speaks in jargon). The others seem as if they are one bad break away from starvation – this isn’t emphasized, it isn’t allowed to break the warmth, but is there.

Klara is played by Margaret Sullavan, Alfred by James Stewart. Both are shockingly distinct from modern stars. The young Stewart is surreally tall and thin, his long large face looking unsupported. Sullavan assumes a shabbiness that will, subverting current expectations, never be thrown off. Suffering from a hearing disorder that made lower sounds more distinct to her, Sullavan speaks from her throat, with a beautifully subtle modulation of the deeper shades of her voice. She retired soon after, though in the prime of her career, and seems to have burned herself up by late mid-life. Reading her Wikipedia page you get a sense of a personality so strong that it had no margin for error, and that being a woman at that time in that industry blew dust into that fine racing mechanism.

There is what I think might be a famous shot in the middle of the film, when Klara is desperately looking for a new letter from her penpal, the anonymized Alfred. We enter the rear of a post office, and glide to the exposed rear openings of a grid of mailboxes. The perspective is unfamiliar enough to force a moment of processing to perceive what is going on – there’s the sense of untangling an optical illusion. All of the boxes have some letters but one, guiding our eyes there, and then a black-gloved hand enters and gropes around the empty box. By this point the camera is in close-up, and the performance of the hand deserves some sort of award for hand-acting. It shoots in firmly, then becomes more hesitant as it skims the walls, then slumps when it becomes apparent there are no letters to be found. Finally it withdraws and Klara’s heartbroken face appears, cruelly sliced by the mailbox’s sharp borders. I felt a warm glow watching this – from the technical beauty, like reading a great line. But when you’re reading it’s line after line, dozens of lines, hundreds of lines. The number of shots in a movie can be less than a hundred. A good shot has a chance to linger with you. When you’re reading an author who deals in good lines, a good line is obliterated by the next before it settles in. The rhythm of most films is such that even a great stylist won’t often step on themselves in this way.

Here’s a line from War and Peace that always struck me as being given room to breathe for the reader: “On the terrace the old man was still sitting as before, as uninterested as a fly on some beloved dead face, knocking on the sole of the bast shoe.”

The character of Alfred is a good example of how audiences are asked to enter into a spirit of playful falseness and complicity with a film. Alfred is meant to be a good man. Yet around the midpoint of the film he discovers that Klara is his penpal, the woman whose letters he has fallen in love with, and whom he knows has in turn fallen in love with her correspondent (Alfred). Rather than telling her, however, he holds off for an extended period of time, even manipulating her, exercising a disturbing power over her. He has various reasons for doing so, but it’s a bad thing to do. How can Alfred the good man do this bad thing? But we as an audience know that for the film to work Alfred can’t tell Klara his secret right away. For us to be entertained the tension must be allowed to mount. And so, while Alfred is hurting Klara he is helping us. More: he is sacrificing his own moral instincts to keep us happy, on tenterhooks. There’s the sense that if he did the right thing, telling Klara as soon as he knows, the film would cease being a film, and the characters would collapse into the oblivion of unmade art.

This is perfectly dealt with in the film’s ending. Alfred finally tells Klara that he’s the one she’s been in love with all along. In response, she should be furious. But she knows just as well as he does that they’re in a movie, and so she adroitly calls back a gag set-up left hanging many scenes ago. Alfred proves his fitness by bringing the gag to its right conclusion, they kiss, fade to black.