The Shop Around the Corner (1940)

The delicacy and sureness of the "Lubitsch touch" may never have been more crucial to the success of any picture than The Shop Around the Corner, a delightful film with an excellent ensemble cast led by Jimmy Stewart and Margaret Sullavan and a classic mistaken-identity premise that has inspired a number of lesser films (notably the Tom Hanks-Meg Ryan vehicle You’ve Got Mail, which acknowledged the source of its inspiration in the name of Ryan’s bookstore, "The Shop Around the Corner").

The shop in Shop is Matuschek & Co., a retail shop inexplicably set in Budapest, where the largely American cast have names like Kralik (Stewart), Klara (Sullavan), and Matuschek (Frank Morgan). Head clerk Kralik is Matuschek’s dependable right-hand man, but he gets off on the wrong foot with the unemployed Klara, who’s looking for a job and surprises Kralik by getting herself hired by Matuschek.

Sparks of one sort are soon flying between Kralik and Klara, who rub the other the wrong way in person — yet a second, anonymous connection (via a lonely-hearts ad) generates sparks of another sort.

With consummate deftness, Lubitsch scratches the surface of ordinary characters and circumstances and reveals the reality behind the deceptive appearances — the substance and doubts beneath the vain posturing, the false heart behind the smiling face, the poetic soul behind the prosaic demeanor — and serves all of it up with soufflé-like lightness.