Director: Ernst Lubitsch
Cast: Margaret Sullavan, James Stewart, Frank Morgan, Joseph Schildkraut
Have I Seen It Before: Oddly enough, no. I’ve seen You’ve Got Mail (1998) probably 50 times or so over the last thirty years, and yet never came around to this one.
Did I Like It: Why did I wait so long to take it in? Probably because I didn’t want to put my self in the unenviable and possibly inevitable position of saying I liked the remake more than the original.
And now here we are.
Two falls bedevil this movie upon which Nora Ephron was able to improve. First, the end game of the film—where he (Stewart) knows who she (Sullavan) is, but she doesn’t know who he is—resolves much too quickly for my taste. I need tension in suspense in my romantic comedies!
Far more egregiously, we are not treated to much of the letters Kralik and Novak trade. Part of the tremendous charm in the later film is that we find these two charming because their writing is undeniably charming. Here, we just have to accept it on faith that they’ve snared each other on vibes alone.
But let us be honest about You’ve Got Mail. It has aged far more egregiously in the thirty years since its premiere than The Shop Around the Corner. One could make a contemporary story today where two people fall in love via letters (it’d be quaint, but you could do it) and work in retail, not knowing that their most annoying co-worker is also their beloved pen pal. One might be tempted to make it all a Social Media thing (indeed, season 2 of Ted Lasso did that under the radar), but you don’t have to. Telling the story of two people falling in love using only their AOL handles, and their comfortable Manhattan lifestyles paid for by working for brick-and-mortar book stores?
All right, The Shop Around the Corner. You win this one.