page_title: The Shop Around the Corner
section_title: Reception
hierarchical_section_title: The Shop Around the Corner / Reception
caption_attribution_description: English: "Style D" poster for the theatrical run of the 1940 American film The Shop Around the Corner.
context_page_description: The Shop Around the Corner is a 1940 American romantic comedy film produced and directed by Ernst Lubitsch and starring Margaret Sullavan, James Stewart and Frank Morgan. The screenplay was written by Samson Raphaelson based on the 1937 Hungarian play Parfumerie by Miklós László. Eschewing regional politics in the years leading up to World War II, the film is about two employees at a leathergoods shop in Budapest who can barely stand each other, not realizing they are falling in love as anonymous correspondents through their letters.
  The Shop Around the Corner is ranked #28 on AFI's 100 Years... 100 Passions, and is listed in Time's All-Time 100 Movies. In 1999, the film was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant." The supporting cast included Joseph Schildkraut, Sara Haden, Felix Bressart, and William Tracy.
context_section_description: The Shop Around the Corner has a 100% rating on Rotten Tomatoes based on 28 reviews, with a weighted average of 8.51/10. The critical consensus states: "Deftly directed by Ernst Lubitsch from a smart, funny script by Samson Raphaelson, The Shop Around the Corner is a romantic comedy in the finest sense of the term." Dave Kehr argued Lubitsch makes "brilliant deployment of point of view, allowing the audience to enter the perceptions of each character at exactly the right moment to develop maximum sympathy and suspense." It ranked 202nd in the British Film Institute's 2012 Sight & Sound critics' poll of the greatest films ever made, having garnered eight critics' votes. The work was also 58th in BBC's 2015 poll of the best American films.
  Film historian David Thomson wrote:
  Among the greatest of all films. This is a love story about a couple too much in love with love to fall tidily into one another's arms. Though it all works out finally, a mystery is left, plus the fear of how easily good people can miss their chances. ...[The movie] is a treasury of hopes and anxieties based in the desperate faces of Stewart and Sullavan. It is a comedy so good it frightens us for them. The café conversation may be the best meeting in American film. The shot of Sullavan's gloved hand, and then her ruined face, searching an empty mail box for a letter is one of the most fragile moments in film. For an instant, the ravishing Sullavan looks old and ill, touched by loss.
caption: Alternate theatrical release poster
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