The Shop Around the Corner/You've Got Mail

Front Row at the Movies by Shirrel Rhoades

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Tropic Cinema is showing a series of films that it calls Holidays at the Tropic. Among them are Ernst Lubitsch’s “The Shop Around the Corner” (1940) and Nora Ephron’s “You’ve Got Mail” (1998) – essentially the same movie, the second a remake.

These two feel-good romances pretty much have the same plot, the letter-writing in the first updated to emails in the second.

For the technologically updated version, James Stewart and Margaret Sullavan are replaced by Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan – a good choice in that the pair had scored big together in Ephron’s earlier rom-com, “Sleepless in Seattle” (1993).

Tom Hanks was a good choice for the more recent remake. He has often been compared with Jimmy Stewart due to his aw-shucks good-guy personality.

And Rotten Tomatoes concluded that in “You’ve Got Mail,” the “great chemistry between the leads made this a warm and charming delight.”

As it happens, “You’ve Got Mail” wasn’t the first remake of “The Shop Around the Corner.” Judy Garland and Van Johnson did a musical version called “The Good Old Summertime” in 1949. However, the true origin of all three was a 1937 Hungarian play called “Parfumerie” by Miklós László. The story also inspired several radio versions, and a Broadway musical (“She Loves Me”).

The plot of the first movie involves two sales people in a Hungarian bookstore (Stewart and Sullavan) who fall for each other through a series of anonymous letters, not realizing they were combative co-workers.

The more modern version pits two rival bookstore owners (Hanks as the owner of a mega-store and Ryan as the proprietor of a small neighborhood shop) against each other, unknowingly falling for each other through a series of AOL exchanges.

Film historian David Thomson has ranked “The Shop Around the Corner” as being among “the greatest of all films.”

Indeed, it is on my Watch Again and Again list.

Both films will be screening at the Tropic Cinema during the Christmas Season.

Email Shirrel: srhoades@aol.com