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Ernst Lubitsch's 1940 Christmas comedy "The Shop Around The Corner" has a bit of everything: petty workplace drama, an affair, and a most unlikely romance, making for a combination that is both sweet and acidic at once. Everything in it is graced with the so-called "Lubitsch touch," a precise set of innuendo and body language that turns funny or sentimental material into something far greater, and the warmth and melancholy of the holiday only heighten that complex feeling. It also is probably the second-best James Stewart-led Christmas movie, just beneath "It's a Wonderful Life."

While "Shop" would sadly be the only Lubitsch movie with James Stewart playing the lead, the actor's typical affability and relaxed posture made him a natural fit for Lubitsch's sensibilities. Few of the director's other leading men, whether they were Gary Cooper or Don Ameche, could match what Stewart could suggest with a raised eyebrow.

CineSavant’s hands-down favorite holiday film, this Ernst Lubitsch classic radiates human kindness in all directions. Nobody is perfect: misunderstandings benign and profound are the gentle impetus for a sweet story that will renew one’s belief that people are basically good. It’s James Stewart’s best pre-war performance, as he fits his character so perfectly; as in last month’s The Mortal Storm he and Margaret Sullavan exude decency and ‘niceness’ even when they’re being rude to each other. Frank Morgan tops his Wizard characterization, and the movie is so generous that it lets the nervy little go-getter William Tracy be the hero of the day. I’m glad this wasn’t re-invented as a sitcom, but they sure ran it through the remake hurdles.

The Shop Around the Corner

Blu-ray

Warner Archive Collection

1940 / B&w / 1:37 Academy / 99 min. / Street Date December 22, 2020 / available through the WBshop / 21.99

Starring: James Stewart,...

Close-Up is a column that spotlights films now playing on Mubi. To Be or Not to Be is playing on Mubi in the Us through August 28.In 2002, the American Film Institute selected To Be or Not to Be as one of the 50 funniest American movies of all time. In March of 1942, when the film was initially released, most critics weren't laughing. A movie lampooning Adolf Hitler may have been acceptable a few years prior (see, for example, Charlie Chaplin's The Great Dictator [1940], though even then Chaplin began to regret his decision after learning more of the Nazis' "homicidal insanity"). But by 1942, Pearl Harbor had been attacked, America had entered World War II, and, to make matters even more dour, the star of To Be or Not to Be, the radiant Carole Lombard, had died in a plane crash less than two months before the premiere. All told, those...

Ninotchka

Written by Charles Brackett, Billy Wilder, Walter Reisch

Directed by Ernst Lubitsch

USA, 1939

It’s easy to see why Ninotchka works as well as it does, and why it’s one of the best films from Hollywood’s golden age and of arguably Hollywood’s greatest year. Just look at the talent involved. Charles Brackett, Billy Wilder, and Walter Reisch were all seasoned writers, though with their best work admittedly still to come. Ernst Lubitsch had directed a number of excellent silent films in Germany, had hit the ground running once in Hollywood, making his first American film with no less a star than Mary Pickford (Rosita [1923]), and after a series of charming musical comedies, many with Maurice Chevalier, directed the more sublime and sophisticated comedies for which he now best known, films like Trouble in Paradise (1932) and Design for Living (1933). While this was happening, Greta Garbo was working...

Miklos Laszlo, a Jewish émigré from Hungary, penned his play Illatszertar in 1936 before he fled Europe in 1938 for New York City. Acquired by producer-director Ernst Lubitsch and brilliantly adapted for the screen as The Shop Around the Corner (1940) by the immortal Samson Raphaelson (who wrote nine screenplays for Lubitsch including Trouble in Paradise, The Merry Widow and Heaven Can Wait), the sublime cast included James Stewart, Margaret Sullavan, Frank Morgan, Joseph Schildkraut and Felix Bressart. It represents perhaps the very pinnacle of transcendent romantic comedy in cinema: precise, subtle, intricately intimate. The material was remade as a

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Fred MacMurray movies: ‘Double Indemnity,’ ‘There’s Always Tomorrow’ Fred MacMurray is Turner Classic Movies’ "Summer Under the Stars" today, Thursday, August 7, 2013. Although perhaps best remembered as the insufferable All-American Dad on the long-running TV show My Three Sons and in several highly popular Disney movies from 1959 to 1967, e.g., The Absent-Minded Professor, Son of Flubber, Boy Voyage!, MacMurray was immeasurably more interesting as the All-American Jerk. (Photo: Fred MacMurray ca. 1940.) Someone once wrote that Fred MacMurray would have been an ideal choice to star in a biopic of disgraced Republican president Richard Nixon. Who knows, the (coincidentally Republican) MacMurray might have given Anthony Hopkins a run for his Best Actor Academy Award nomination. After all, MacMurray’s most admired movie performances are those in which he plays a scheming, conniving asshole: Billy Wilder’s classic film noir Double Indemnity (1944), in which he’s seduced by Barbara Stanwyck, and Wilder...

Title: To Be Or Not To Be Director: Ernst Lubitsch Starring: Carole Lombard, Jack Benny, Robert Stack, Felix Bressart, Lionel Atwill, Stanley Ridges, Sig Ruman. The younger generations who have missed a great all time classic such as Ernst Lubitsch’s ‘To Be Or Not To Be,’ will soon have the chance to see its full version restored, in Blu-Ray. The title is a reference to the famous Shakespearean soliloquy in Hamlet and becomes a humorous leitmotiv throughout Ernst Lubitsch’s film. The 1942 American comedy is about a troupe of theatre actors in Nazi-occupied Warsaw, who use their acting abilities to mock and disguise amongst the German troops. The movie had been [ Read More ]

The post The Restored ‘To Be Or Not To Be’ Movie Review appeared first on Shockya.com.

In 1939, MGM released an effervescent, lightly satirical romantic comedy called Ninotchka (available on DVD) which ranks well among the enduring delights of American cinema, yet virtually all its makers were heavily accented Europeans: a Swedish superstar, Greta Garbo; a Polish-German director-producer, Ernst Lubitsch; two Viennese scenarists, Billy Wilder and Walter Reisch; a Hungarian story-writer, Melchoir Lengyel; a German composer, Werner Heymann; Prussian, Hungarian and German supporting actors, Felix Bressart, Bela Lugosi, and Sig Ruman. While the picture is about Russian aristocrats and communists (seduced by the Western world) in Paris, it was shot entirely in Culver City, California, and…...