The Brooks Museum of Art’s ongoing “Reel to Real” series, in which Memphians involved in the city’s film and arts scene select and introduce films, continues this Thursday night. The host for this edition is, um, me.
- Margaret Sullavan, Jimmy Stewart, and Frank Morgan in the neglected masterpiece The Shop Around the Corner .
Because Memphis audiences have displayed such a ravenous appetite for classic Hollywood films not named Casablanca or Gone With the Wind or directed by Alfred Hitchcock, I’m showing Ernst Lubitsch’s 1940 romantic/workplace comedy The Shop Around the Corner, selected because it’s probably my favorite film that A) isn’t widely known and B) as far as I know hasn’t screened locally (at least since it’s original run).
The film stars Jimmy Stewart and Margaret Sullivan as a pair of bickering clerks at Matuschek’s, a little leather-good’s shop in Budapest. They spar during their workdays while each is secretly pursuing an anonymous romance with a pen pal, not realizing that they’ve been writing to each other. This romantic conceit plays out against the backdrop of the shop, the primary location and a complicated source of stability for its employees against the very uncertain backdrop of post-Depression, pre-WWII Budapest.
