Some years ago, the Guardian’s Anne T. Donahue recommended, as an alternative Christmas movie, Nora Ephron’s You’ve Got Mail from 1998. “Admittedly, You’ve Got Mail takes place from October to spring,” she writes, “but what matters most is that the movie’s most compelling scenes — when Joe Fox (Tom Hanks) discovers that Kathleen Kelly (Meg Ryan) is ShopGirl, when they have coffee, when Kathleen realizes she’s probably going to lose her store (and again, no, not crying) — occur over the Best Time of Year™.” If none of this rings a bell, jingle or otherwise, you may need to get up to speed on the romantic comedies of the nineteen-nineties. You’d do well to begin with Ephron’s previous Christmastime-set Hanks-and-Ryan vehicle, Sleepless in Seattle.
Despite being primarily considered a spiritual sequel to Sleepless in Seattle, You’ve Got Mail is also an adaptation of a much earlier picture, Ernst Lubitsch’s The Shop Around the Corner. Released in 1940, it stars James Stewart and Margaret Sullavan as co-workers in a Budapest leather goods shop whose mutual animosity conceals, even to themselves, the fact that they’ve been amorously corresponding after being connected through a personals ad. This premise (which in turn comes from Parfumerie, a 1937 play by Miklós László) holds out practically unlimited mileage to the rom-com genre. That two high-profile films have faithfully adhered to Parfumerie gives cinephiles an opportunity to compare and contrast, making a study of how film itself changed over nearly six decades.
Evan Puschak, better known as the Nerdwriter, attempts just such an exercise in the new video above, focusing on a particularly memorable scene shared by the two movies. “On the day the pen pals finally agree to meet at a café, the man, who gets there second, sees through the window that his beloved is actually his real-life antagonist, and because of this, doesn’t reveal his true identity. This imbalance of knowledge makes for a marvelous scene of dramatic irony, creating a tension that is at once heart-wrenching and hilarious.” In The Shop Around the Corner, this scene plays out in a little over eight minutes; in You’ve Got Mail, it takes nearly ten. But what really separates the styles of the earlier picture and the later is “the number of shots used to cover the scene.”
“In 1940, Lubitsch filmed the café scene in just nineteen shots. In comparison, Nora Ephron, 58 years later, used 133 shots for the same material,” resulting in a difference in average shot length of well over twenty seconds. This increase in cutting could reflect the fact that “early filmmaking techniques were influenced by the conventions of stage plays, where many filmmakers” — Lubitsch included — “began their careers,” whereas “films of the eighties and nineties were influenced by music videos and commercials, which increased viewer tolerance for more rapid editing,” to say nothing of the many other wider cultural differences between the prewar years and the end of the millennium. And when, some Christmas down the line, this material next gets adapted, it will presumably reflect the aesthetics (so to speak) of TikTok.
Related content:
Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut, the Most Troubling Christmas Film Ever Made
Nora Ephron’s Lists: “What I Will Miss” and “What I Won’t Miss”
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
Shop Around the Corner was a charming classic.
You’ve Got Mail was a horrible mess in which the rich schmuck runs the heroine out of business, but still wins the girl.
The only saving grace was the Steve Zahn character.