Critics reviews

As the department store clerks and pen pals who spar so fiercely It Can Only Be Love, Stewart and Sullivan enact a classic screwball pairing, but it's all part of a gentle, utopian vision of the workplace as a haven from troubles and source of true companionship.

Of the many romantic comedy stories that depend on withholding crucial information from its characters until the best and latest possible moments, The Shop Around the Corner lowers the boom fairly early on, rendering the second half virtually weightless. The big double-crisis is averted, and what remains of the script is a series of payoffs, each less spectacular than the one before, like a sequence of bittersweet last looks before locking up a store for a long holiday weekend.

If there's a richer film out there about the invisible fault lines of the working world, the subtle and precarious gradations of class and position, the shape of solidarity, and the perpetually disarming, cussed strangeness of human relationships, I've never seen it. (In fact, I would be frightened if such a film existed.)

For my money, this is Lubitsch's masterpiece, an immaculate conflation of his sprightly shooting style, expertly layered wisecracking and bracing realism, all topped off with a romantic subplot that offers a nakedly joyous celebration of young, serendipitous love.

Lubitsch never allows us to put out of mind that even if Klara and Alfred eventually achieve harmony, their horizon of expectations will never exceed the constraints that house Mr. Matuschek's (Frank Morgan) constellation of clerks. And yet, one should not obscure the warmth and abundance of behavioural felicities in The Shop Around The Corner by alluding to the grimness that coexists with the grandeur.

While Alfred Kralik would seem to be the central, driving character of The Shop Around the Corner, he is in fact constructed as a pure female fantasy, the ultimate Ideal Male for any young Tertiary Sector woman. Kralik comes into being in an impeccable dialectical movement... it is he who will eventually accomplish the arduous task of synthesising these two antagonistic dimensions, and it is precisely there, not in his insubstantial version, that he will become the Ideal Male.

There are no art deco nightclubs, shimmering silk gowns, or slamming bedroom doors to be seen, but this 1940 film is one of Ernst Lubitsch's finest and most enduring works... Interwoven with subplots centered on the other members of the shop's little family, the romance proceeds through Lubitsch's brilliant deployment of point of view, allowing the audience to enter the perceptions of each individual character at exactly the right moment to develop maximum sympathy and suspense.