Class Act
Elbert Ventura offers a wonderful appreciation of the “other” Jimmy Stewart Christmas movie, the unjustly neglected Ernst Lubitsch production, The Shop Around the Corner.
The collision of the ideal and the real is Lubitsch’s theme: Can love’s fulfillment possibly match the exalted fancies it inspires? When Alfred finds out his pen pal’s true identity, he confronts both disappointment and fear. His mystery woman turns out to be one he knew all along. And now he has to introduce himself—earnest, reliable Alfred Kralik—to a woman who has conjured up an impossible ideal in his place. When he finally reveals himself to Klara, the most poignant moment isn’t the confession of love but the betrayal of anxiety. “Are you disappointed?” he asks her, a question that recalls the heartbreaking ending of Chaplin’s City Lights, when the Little Tramp shows his face for the first time to the once-blind woman he loves.
I first saw Shop at three in the morning on the tiny TV in a hospital emergency room. It was nowhere near Christmas season. I had never heard of the movie before seeing it. I’m predisposed to like anything Jimmy Stewart because he graduated from my high school, but Shop spoke to me anyway, more than the Hitchcock vehicles or Liberty Vallence or Stewart’s other great contributions to the movies, and yes, more than It’s a Wonderful Life.
The glorious thing about Shop is that its focus is so relentlessly commercial. Its Christmas is the season of shopping; its characters’ chief holiday concern is whether they’ll make plan. Once Alfred knows that Klara is his dream girl, his concern turns immediately to whether she’ll be getting him the wallet he wants, or some less suitable gift he knows, by way of the grapevine, she’s thinking of getting her mystery sweetheart. (She doesn’t quite know yet that Alfred is him.) When the store owner has his heart attack, everyone worries about his health, and also how it will affect sales.
I had fourteen of those Christmases during my days in retail management, and the way the movie gets that life right is a special thrill. There’s a special pride in watching the stack of something you had the foresight to order heavy dwindle because it is, indeed, the thing that people want, and a special delight too – you see the money piling up, and you see people happy because you successfully guessed what would make them happy. Closing up a store on Christmas Eve after a successful season feels like ringing down the curtain on a well-reviewed show.
Shop gets all that, and the quotidian vanities and hopes of its salesmen and managers. But it’s also great on how people try to do the right thing, even in the face of real risk – the Depression lurks at the edges of the big display window like a draft. When Stewart’s Kralik temporarily loses his job, he feels economic fear, hurt pride and a mitigating sense of honorL his acceptance that the decision is the store owner’s prerogative.
I can’t say enough good things about it. There’s no Christmas movie I like better, and Elbert Ventura’s essay is worthy of its source material.
