Pop Culture 101 - THE SHOP AROUND THE CORNER

In a letter to a biographer, director Ernst Lubitsch listed what he felt were his best films. He cited Trouble in Paradise (1932) as his best film stylistically and Ninotchka (1939) as his most devastating satire. But when it came to human comedy, he said, "I think I never was as good as in The Shop Around the Corner. Never did I make a picture in which the atmosphere and the characters were truer than in this picture."

The Shop Around the Corner was later remade by MGM as In the Good Old Summertime (1949), a musical vehicle starring Judy Garland and Van Johnson.

In 1963, Broadway adapted The Shop Around the Corner into the stage play She Loves Me, which the BBC later brought to television in 1979.

The Shop Around the Corner also served as the basis for the romantic comedy, You've Got Mail (1998), by writer/director Nora Ephron and starring Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan. In that picture, Meg is the owner of a small bookstore called the Shop Around the Corner.

by Scott McGee