Synopsis
Two employees at a gift shop can barely stand one another, without realising that they are falling in love through the post as each other's anonymous pen pal.
1940 Directed by Ernst Lubitsch
Two employees at a gift shop can barely stand one another, without realising that they are falling in love through the post as each other's anonymous pen pal.
Margaret Sullavan James Stewart Frank Morgan Joseph Schildkraut Sara Haden Felix Bressart William Tracy Inez Courtney Sarah Edwards Edwin Maxwell Charles Halton Charles Smith Charles Arnt Joan Blair Mary Carr Mabel Colcord Claire Du Brey William Edmunds Grace Hayle Mira McKinney Sol Murgi Renie Riano Gertrude Simpson Ruth Warren
Rendez-vous, Scrivimi fermo posta, El Bazar de las sorpresas, A Loja da Esquina, Магазинчик за углом, Kauppa kulman takana, Saroküzlet, Het winkeltje om den hoek, Den lille butik, To magazi tis gonias, Rendezvous nach Ladenschluß, 오리지날 유브 갓 메일, 모퉁이 서점, 모퉁이가게
imagine having a secret pen pal and them turning out to be jimmy stewart i would Die on the spot
I met my wife, Lise, through correspondence. Over 100 pages of e.mails through the entire month of August, 1999, before we finally met up on August 31st.
After our first perfunctory exchanges about who we were and what we liked, .. me: bands, biking, mixtapes and movies … Lise: bookcases, throw pillows, dogs and cats, and, amongst a list much longer than mine … ‘talking about movies’. Bingo.
Our next set of letters was all about the movies.
My top 10:
2001: A Space Odyssey
Doctor Zhivago
Dr. Strangelove
The Graduate
Brazil
The Deer Hunter
Blood Simple
Raising Arisona
Smash Palace
The Great Santini
One From the Heart
Bonus pick – Joe Versus the Volcano
Lise’s Top 10:
The Vanishing…
“How much is that belt in the window, the one that says $2.95?”
“$2.95......”
So perfectly constructed it can be easy to initially overlook its feeling of spontaneity and human interaction. Even a suicide attempt, framed indirectly by the pop of a light bulb, plays less as black comedy than an impossibly optimistic show of human empathy and interdependence. That its revelation of lovers' identities to each other occurs after all the bright lights have been turned off around them seems so fitting for a film that subtly inverts everything you expect while producing a paragon of generic entertainment.
Wait this movie is set in BUDAPEST? Jimmy Stewart's character is HUNGARIAN???
In between asking, “where’d you find this one, Gabe?” my father kept commenting that all the characters were wearing hats and how funny it is and that we should all wear hats nowadays like them. We kept shushing him. During the final scene, he left the room and came back out with a big cowboy hat and walked in front of the TV.
the way james stewart is always at least 5 feet taller than everyone else is sending me
I went into screenwriter mode about 30 minutes into the film. I could predict where it was going and how it was going to get there. I was enjoying it, but I knew where it was headed.
Ha!
HA! I said.
I've never been so happy to be so wrong, and JHC was I proved wrong. Every friggin' 10 minutes Lubitsch and the screenwriter and the playwright were giving me the middle finger salute and I was loving it. The writing would come at me sideways, I would adjust my expectations and then get hit from the other side 10 minutes later. On and on it went, and I was lapping it up laughing out loud with a smile wider…