Great On Screen Couples: Margaret Sullavan and James Stewart

One of Hollywood's most beloved on screen couples has to be Margaret Sullavan and James Stewart. The pair made four films together: Next Time We Love (1936); The Shopworn Angel (1938); The Shop Around The Corner (1940); and The Mortal Storm (1940). I have seen the last two films and like them very much. Now just need to see their first two films.

The pair met in 1931 when Stewart stage-managed a touring play starring Sullavan. They even dated briefly during this time period. They did not act together until landing in Hollywood. Sullavan had already scored some hit films including Next Time We Love (1933). She requesting Stewart for their first film together, Next Time We Love. History says that Stewart was so inexperienced that he was about to be fired until Sullavan took it upon herself to rehearse each night with him, refining his acting skills. And it worked.

Their next film, The Shopworn Angel (1938), was intended for Jean Harlow. But Jean's untimely death opened the door for Sullavan, who once again requested Stewart as her leading man. This film showed that Stewart could be a true romantic star.

After the success of Angel, Universal got the pair together again for probably their most known and beloved film, The Shop Around The Corner. It is considered one of the greatest romantic comedies of all time. Certainly having Ernst Lubitsch as director did not hurt.

For their final film together, a somber and dramatic piece called The Mortal Storm. Audiences did not like this pairing as much as their previous films and would end their pairings. Stewart would enlist in the army while Sullavan would return to Broadway. But their place in history of greatest film couples is firmly entrenched.

Notes:

The Shop Around The Corner was remade twice. In 1949 with Judy Garland and Van Johnson called In The Good Old Summertime. And in 1998 with Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan called You've Got Mail. For my money, the original is by far the best.

Norma Shearer was so impressed by Stewart's performance in The Shopworn Angel that she set her sights on him. They dated for six weeks.

While at Princeton, Stewart asked Sullavan to attend a school reception with him. Sullavan would later say that it was the longest, slowest, shyest but most sincere invitation she had ever received.

Notes provided by TCM's Leading Couples.

Back Street (1941)

***^½
Country: US
Director: Robert Stevenson


It isn't his fault. It isn't my fault.

For more than four decades, from the 1920s to the mid-1960s, Fannie Hurst wrote popular novels and short stories about women and their problems, with the emphasis on their romantic lives. F. Scott Fitzgerald once famously predicted that nothing she wrote would be remembered ten years later. Not surprisingly, a number of her works were adapted for the screen during the heyday of the woman's picture in the studio years, and it is these movies that in a way have proved Fitzgerald wrong. Among the movies adapted from her work are Four Daughters (1938) and its two sequels and musical remake, Young at Heart (1954), the Joan Crawford-John Garfield picture Humoresque (1946), two versions of her novel Imitation of Life (1934 and 1959), and three versions of her novel Back Street (1932, 1941, and 1961). The 1941 and 1961 versions of Back Street have recently been released on DVD as part of the TCM Vault Collection.

The 1941 version from Universal stars Charles Boyer as Walter Saxel and Margaret Sullavan as Ray Smith, the woman who has a three decade-long affair with him. The two first meet in Cincinnati around the turn of the twentieth century. Ray is a young woman working in a dress shop with her spoiled stepsister and overbearing stepmother and Walter a businessman traveling through town when the two meet and fall in love. Their plans to get married are derailed by a melodramatic contrivance typical of this kind of picture, and each moves on. Five years later they run across each other by chance during a snowstorm in New York, where Ray is working as a fashion designer and Walter, now married and a father, is working in the investment bank of his wife's uncle. Finding that their feelings for each other have not cooled, they soon begin an affair that lasts nearly thirty years. During this time Ray voluntarily sacrifices her life, career, and chance to marry another man to be Walter's mistress, his kept "back street" woman.

The plot may be pure soap opera, but the resulting film is a splendid example of its genre, avoiding obvious sentimentality in favor of a light and subtle touch. Everything about the movie is restrained. The direction by Robert Stevenson (the very good 1943 version of Jane Eyre and a slew of Disney movies in the 1960s, including Mary Poppins) is professional and unobtrusive, the marvelous set decoration and costumes create a flavorful period atmosphere without being overdone, and the photography by the great William Daniels is first-rate. Even the music is subdued. What really makes this movie special, though, is its star, Margaret Sullavan.

I've been a fan of Margaret Sullavan since first seeing her many years ago in Ernst Lubtisch's The Shop Around the Corner (1941). Sullavan, who died in 1960, was a trained stage actress who made only seventeen movies in her brief screen career, all but one in the ten years between 1933 and 1943. I've seen about half of these, and of the ones I've seen, her performance in Back Street is among her very best, right up there with her Klara Novak in that Lubitsch masterpiece and her tragic Patricia in Frank Borzage's Three Comrades (1938), a performance that earned her the New York Film Critics Circle award and an Oscar nomination as best actress.

Sullavan had a screen presence that was unique among the actresses of her generation. With her unusual voice, both throaty and breathy, no one else sounded quite like her. Her ability to register fine emotional shifts with that voice and with her subtle facial expressions made her an ideal film actress. She was not a conventionally beautiful woman and in fact could at times look quite plain. But in Back Street she looks as lovely as I've ever seen her, helped by the high-necked gowns and pinned-up hairstyles and by cinematographer William Daniels's sympathetic lighting. (A master at making actresses look beautiful, he was Garbo's favorite cinematographer, working with her on twenty-one pictures.)

But it was above all the personal qualities Sullavan projected—an unusual and very appealing combination of strength and delicacy—that made her unlike any other screen actress of her time. I can't think of any of her contemporaries who could simultaneously express these exact qualities as consistently and with so little apparent effort as Sullavan did, with such a finely calibrated sense of balance that they seem to coexist naturally in every character I've seen her play. In Back Street she dominates the movie not only because her character is the most important in the film, but because of the way she infuses that character so completely with her unique personality. Her distinctive screen presence is the thing that holds the movie together and elevates it above standard tearjerker fare.

At the beginning of the picture, Ray is criticized by her stepmother for being so friendly with the traveling salesmen who visit their shop. There's a wonderful scene early in the film where Ray is playing cards with a group of these salesmen, the only woman at the table. It's clear that she is completely at ease with these men and that they are thrilled to be socializing with such an attractive and personable young woman. Sullavan manages to convey an easy camaraderie with the men without losing any of her femininity or seeming in any way loose or flirtatious. She's naturally intelligent and unselfconscious, and it's easy to see why Walter would be attracted to her as soon as he meets her. Ray is also an independent woman, someone who feels stifled by the limitations of her circumstances and yearns for a more meaningful life. You can sense this in the wistfulness Sullavan was so good at projecting, the same wistfulness that motivated her Klara in The Shop Around the Corner.

When Ray meets Walter again in New York, she has realized her aspirations and is living as a single career woman. When she forgoes her career and eventually sacrifices her independence to become his mistress, it's presented as a measure of the strength of her love for Walter that she is willing to give up things which plainly mean so much to her. This idea of sacrifice for love was at the heart of the woman's pictures that were so popular from the 1930s through the 1950s, sacrifice for a child or for a lover. It may seem a strange attitude to modern sensibilities, but keep in mind that the story takes place in the early 1900s and reflects the mores of its time. These are mores and a social milieu that were explored with a more probing and feminist slant by writers like Edith Wharton, and in some ways Back Street resembles a less socially aware and more melodramatic version of Wharton's novels like The Age of Innocence and The House of Mirth. It may be difficult for modern viewers to understand Ray's decisions, but there is one constant in her situation, which is that people in love have always behaved foolishly and often in ways that are not in their own interest, and they still do.

Charles Boyer's Walter is a more difficult person to understand. He seems to expect to have both a family and a mistress as a privilege of his sex and social standing. He loves Ray but seems insensitive to the sacrifices she makes for him, a man concerned only with his own happiness and not above exploiting her feelings for him in order to keep her. The film maintains a neutral attitude to Walter, but neither does it or Boyer do anything to make him overtly sympathetic. That makes it easy for modern viewers to condemn him for his selfishness. But again, I think we need to remind ourselves of the mores of the time, when such expectations as Walter's were not uncommon and privileged men like Walter tended not to feel guilty about the emotional demands they made of women like Ray.

At the end of the film, after a quarter-century as Walter's mistress, how does Ray really feel about the personal sacrifices she has made for him? The conventions of this kind of movie idealize such sacrifices, portraying them as either noble or tragic. Back Street doesn't romanticize her situation, though, again taking a surprisingly neutral view of her actions. In the end, we don't know for sure if she was happy or unhappy about her decisions and the course of her life. We just know this was the way it happened, and that tone of emotional understatement—a rarity in films of this type—coupled with Margaret Sullavan's graceful and touching performance has made Back Street age uncommonly well.

You might also be interested in:

• Three Comrades (1938)
• Fairy Tales Can Come True: The Good Fairy (1935)
• Have Yourself a Merry Lubitsch Christmas: The Shop Around the Corner (1941)

Three Comrades (1938)

***^½
Country: US
Director: Frank Borzage

Andrew Sarris has called the director Frank Borzage "an uncompromising romanticist . . . [with] a genuine concern with the wondrous inner life of lovers in the midst of adversity," a description of Borzage's work well illustrated by Three Comrades. Based on the novel by Erich Maria Remarque (All Quiet on the Western Front), the movie opens on Armistice Day in 1918. Three war buddies from the German military—Erich (Robert Taylor), Otto (Franchot Tone), and Gottfried (Robert Young)—are celebrating the end of World War I in a tavern and making plans for the future. When a German officer proposes a toast in honor of all those who have died in the war—German, British, French, American, and Italian alike—the three young men are clearly in accord with his feelings. Meanwhile, at a nearby table three stiff-necked officers bristle at these sentiments of reconciliation with former enemies, foreshadowing future confrontations between nationalistic fascists and those who believe in tolerance and peace like the three young comrades.

Two years later the German economy has collapsed and the three young men, their lives permanently marked by their war experiences, are barely eking out a living from the garage and taxi service they run. When they drive to a rural tavern to celebrate Erich's birthday, they encounter a young woman named Patricia (Margaret Sullavan), a "fallen aristocrat" who has lost her money in the postwar financial crash. All three are enchanted by her, but it is Erich with whom she falls in love. Against this background of economic hardship and political unrest, the lovers struggle to maintain their relationship and the three comrades their close friendship. Complicating the situation even further, Patricia is seriously ill with tuberculosis and Gottfried has become involved with a pacifist political group that is the target of the nascent fascist movement. Still, the four are able to maintain a camaraderie that cannot be touched by the problems of the time. "Where you walk," Otto says to Patricia at one point, "we three walk beside you."

Franchot Tone, Robert Taylor, Margaret Sullavan, and Robert Young

Throughout the film Borzage deftly maintains a fine balance between the romantic and the realistic. Always in the background, and at times irrupting into the foreground, is the threat to love and friendship caused by economic difficulties and political discord. But the main emphasis of the film is the romance, and ultimately the marriage, between Patricia and Erich. Although events of the time are never neglected, it is plainly the personal element of the story that most interests Borzage—the emotional effects of outside events on these four people and the way they are unable to avoid the complications to their lives caused by those events. The realistic underpinnings of this deeply romantic film give it a profoundly moving, richly emotional quality that a strictly sentimental love story could never attain.

Borzage's sensitive direction, the elegant cinematography of Joseph Ruttenberg (The Philadelphia Story, Gaslight, Gigi), and the unobtrusively fluid editing all contribute to the strength of the movie. But this is above all else a movie about the emotional lives of its characters, the kind of film dependent on actors to put the story across. Borzage uses Taylor's pretty-boy blandness to good effect, making obvious the appeal of his hopeful, boyish personality to the world-weary Patricia. Young, who has the smallest role, is perhaps a bit mild as the most political of the three comrades, an idealist whose war experiences have transformed him into a committed activist. I kept wondering if a more passionate actor like the young James Stewart might have made a stronger impression in the role. Tone, as the most intelligent of the three, has never been better—by turns relaxed and intense, and although clearly in love with Patricia himself, deferential to her stronger feelings for Erich. Together the three men form a sort of trine of the masculine personality: emotions, action, and intellect.

Regular readers of The Movie Projector will be aware of how much I admire Margaret Sullavan and how strongly I feel that she deserves to be better known. (For more about her life and career, see my post on The Good Fairy.) In Three Comrades she gave probably the best performance of her relatively brief screen career, receiving an Oscar nomination and winning the New York Film Critics Circle award for best actress. (She lost the Oscar to Bette Davis for Jezebel.) Her marvelous Patricia, a woman of outward frailty and inner strength, is the glue that holds the movie together. Having lost her money and her health, she has resigned herself with stoical acceptance to a forlorn future. Yet she hasn't altogether lost her sense of humor—even if it has a touch of the gallows in it—or her capacity to accept and return love when she finds it. She is too much of a realist to nurture the false hope that her happiness with Erich will last; she is enough of a fatalist to know that forces outside their control make that unlikely. But she is completely willing to live for the present in the glow of their feelings for each other while she has the chance. When she recognizes that the time to let go of Erich has come, she does so with selflessness and grace. It is a performance of rare delicacy, nuance, and serenity.

One last thing I should mention is that Three Comrades is the only screenplay officially credited to F. Scott Fitzgerald. Fitzgerald was not pleased with what MGM did with his script, though, and understandably so. In 1938 MGM still wanted to protect the distribution of its movies in Germany and actually submitted the script to the German ambassador to the US, who wanted certain changes made. All overt references to anything that might be construed as reflecting badly on contemporary Germany or the Nazi party were modified or removed. Even though in retrospect it's easy to see implicit criticism of Nazi Germany and the post-World War I attitudes which brought the Nazis to power, this criticism is so generic that there is no denying that the movie sidesteps crucial political issues. It wouldn't be until the powerful anti-Nazi film The Mortal Storm (again starring Sullavan) in 1940—with World War II begun in Europe, although the US was not yet involved—that Borzage was able to criticize the Nazis openly.

Fairy Tales Can Come True

There was nobody like her before or since. . . . In talent, in looks, in character, in temperament. . . . And very early it became obvious she was a brilliant actress.

—Henry Fonda on Margaret Sullavan

The actress Margaret Sullavan starred in only seventeen movies in her screen career, all but one of them released in the ten years between 1933 and 1943. I first saw her in Ernst Lubitsch's The Shop Around the Corner (1940) a comedy in which her accomplished performance—she expertly suggests the seemingly contradictory character traits of confidence and vulnerability, strength and fragility, maturity and innocence—completely won me over. I thought I knew the great American actresses of the 1930s studio era, but I had barely even heard of her and never before seen her in anything. I did know she had won the New York Film Critic Circle award for best actress for her performance in Three Comrades (1938) and had also been nominated for an Oscar for that performance (her only nomination).

So more than twenty years later, when I got the chance to see Three Comrades I made a point of not missing it. It is indeed a great performance in which Sullavan expresses many of the same paradoxical character qualities as in The Shop Around the Corner, but in a completely different context and to very different effect. Three Comrades is no charming Lubitsch confection, but rather an ultra-romantic tragedy directed by the master of such movies, Frank Borzage, for whom Sullavan made four pictures all together. Like Greta Garbo in Camille, Sullavan plays the mistress of a wealthy older man (although the movie is coy about the exact nature of their relationship) who falls in love with an innocent young man played, as in Camille, by Robert Taylor. Like Garbo in that film, Sullavan is a doomed tragic heroine dying of consumption. And she is very, very good. The entirely natural charm and undertone of wistful melancholy she projects makes it utterly believable that all three war buddies of the title would fall in love with her. Since then I've made an effort to see her in every movie of hers shown on TCM. Recently I was able to catch one of her earliest, The Good Fairy (1935), Sullavan's third movie.

The Good Fairy is, like The Shop Around the Corner, a comedy set in Budapest and also based on a play, this time by Ferenc Molnár. In it, Sullavan plays Luisa Ginglebuscher, a young woman plucked from an orphanage to work as an usherette in a large movie palace. Her character is immediately established as the personification of naïveté. She is first seen exuberantly telling a fairy tale—complete with a wicked fairy and a good fairy—to the youngest residents of the orphanage. She takes completely to heart the simplistic moral instruction she has received at the orphanage, including the admonition to perform one good deed a day, and sees herself as a real-life good fairy helping others realize their wishes. Few actresses could have made such a child-like character so convincing without making her seem childish, but Sullavan does.

No sooner is she out in the world than she is besieged by lecherous men seeking to take advantage of her obvious inexperience and vulnerability. Accosted outside the cinema one night by a glib would-be lothario (Cesar Romero), she escapes by claiming to be married and seizing as her mock-husband the first innocuous-looking man she sees walking down the street (Reginald Owen). He turns out to be a waiter at a grand hotel who, charmed by the girl, gets her an invitation to a ritzy ball at the hotel. Here she is approached by a horny millionaire (Frank Morgan) who immediately sets out to try to seduce her. When, with the help of her self-appointed protector the Waiter, she finally catches on to his intentions, she repeats the trick of claiming to be already married and while Morgan is out of the room picks the name of a lawyer, Max Sporum (Herbert Marshall), at random from the telephone book.

I have so far described only the first fifteen minutes or so of the movie. For the rest, suffice it to say that the situation Luisa has created quickly lurches out of control, snowballing into a series of deceptions, misunderstandings, and impromptu coverups that keep the complications coming without letup. Luisa is required to keep all these multiple fictions spinning in the air like balls while at the same time falling in love with Marshall, following her philosophy of doing good deeds, being a good fairy by attempting to engineer happy outcomes for those in whose lives she has become involved, and preserving her virtue by evading the sexual advances of the various men pursuing her. The plot might sound like Lubitsch, but the result is like a Lubitsch movie on speed.

The screenplay is based on a translation of a play by Ferenc Molnár, whose novels and plays were the basis of many, mostly light-hearted, movies, including The Guardsman (1931), starring Lunt and Fontanne, Rogers and Hammersein's Carousel (1956), The Swan (1956) with Grace Kelly and Alec Guinness, and Billy Wilder's One, Two, Three (1961). But for the screenplay of The Good Fairy, the material was considerably reworked by Preston Sturges, and it is his hand more than any other that comes through in the final film. This is a movie driven not by a genteel Eastern European sensibility but by pungent, wit-drenched dialogue, double-entendre (when Luisa talks about leaving "the asylum," nobody realizes she's referring to the orphans' asylum), farcical misunderstandings, risqué sexual innuendo, and a frenetic pace that resembles the most breathless of Howard Hawks's screwball comedies.

One episode that bears the unmistakable stamp of Sturges occurs in the movie theater where Luisa works. After showing a couple to their seats, she is so captivated by the movie, which is already playing, that she sits down and starts watching it. This movie-within-a-movie is a hilarious send-up of an overwrought tearjerker, complete with edits and tracking shots. The scenes we are shown consist of a distraught upper-class woman being separated from her child and evicted from their sumptuous apartment by her stiff-necked husband for some unstated moral transgression. As she pleads with him not to reject her, he sternly repeats one word over and over: "Go!" Always pointing to the door, he says this at least twenty times—never altering his delivery or intonation—until it becomes absurdly funny. The scene has Luisa in tears, but the viewer in stitches.

The director, surprisingly, is William Wyler, whose specialty was adaptations of novels (by authors including Sinclair Lewis, Emily Brontë, Theodore Dreiser, Somerset Maugham, even John Fowles) and plays by heavyweight dramatists like Sidney Kingsley and Lillian Hellman. By their nature, then, these were quite serious movies. This makes it all the more amazing that The Good Fairy, about the only outright comedy he ever directed, is such a funny movie.

Wyler was not associated with any one studio. Instead he worked at various studios and with various producers (he was for many years closely associated with the producer Samuel Goldwyn before he began producing his own pictures in the late 1940s) and thus had an unusual amount of control over his projects. This control meant he was able to use the best technicians, writers, and performers available, and there is no doubt that, as with his best work, the success of The Good Fairy is in large measure the result of this knack for assembling and presiding over the right personnel for the movie. I have already mentioned the contribution of Preston Sturges to the film. But even a script by a genius like Sturges achieves its full expression only with the right actors delivering those brilliantly written lines, and this movie is blessed with an exceptional cast.

Herbert Marshall was for several years in the 1930s a romantic leading man before moving on to supporting character roles. (Wyler himself would later use Marshall in this way in The Letter and The Little Foxes.) In Lubitsch's Trouble in Paradise (1932) he was a debonair conman romancing both Miriam Hopkins and Kay Francis, in Blonde Venus (1932) Marlene Dietrich's husband, and in The Painted Veil (1934) Greta Garbo's husband. In The Good Fairy he gives a wonderful leading performance first as Luisa's dupe and then as the object of her romantic feelings. Under Luisa's influence, his pompous moralizing and emotional remoteness eventually give way to an unexpected capacity for warmth, humor, and affection, rather like the transformation effected by Katharine Hepburn's ditzy heiress on Cary Grant's uptight paleontologist in Bringing Up Baby. Marshall succeeds so well in his role not by trying to be funny but by playing it straight, by finding and bringing out the humor in the character rather than imposing it on the role with overtly comic mannerisms.

The supporting cast, on the other hand, is filled with character actors who rely on a comic persona, the kind of supporting players who contribute immeasurably to the pleasure the best American comedies of the 1930s and 1940s bring to viewers. Eric Blore, so memorable in the Astaire-Rogers movies and in The Lady Eve and Sullivan's Travels for Sturges, is great fun in the early section of the movie, especially in his tipsy scene. For once he plays not a butler or valet, but a government minister. Alan Hale has only a few scenes but leaves a distinct impression as the eccentric who hires Luisa as a movie theater usherette. Reginald Owen is by turns solicitous and overbearing as Luisa's protector the Waiter, who might just have romantic designs on her himself.

Best of all is the splendid Frank Morgan as the business tycoon chasing Luisa. He is really the prime mover of the plot; most of the things she does are in response to his actions. As for his pursuit of her, he is more a blustering, flustered big pussycat than a sly predator, a character not too dissimilar to the one he played in the greatest role of his career, Matuschek in Lubitsch's The Shop Around the Corner. In fact, I would say that his performance in The Good Fairy—the role is really quite large; he has nearly as much screen time as Marshall—is in my estimation exceeded only by his performance in that Lubitsch masterpiece.

That brings us back to Margaret Sullavan, the one person above all others who with her charming and radiant performance as Luisa makes The Good Fairy such a special film. Brooke Hayward, Sullavan's daughter, describes her mother in a way that I think applies equally to her performing style in this movie and others: "She didn't seem to talk, like other people, but to communicate information physically, as if she were leaning into whatever she was saying, not only with her voice—which even in a whisper crackled with electricity—but her entire body."

Earlier I wrote of the way Sullavan embodied in her film roles seemingly opposite qualities of character. Her life off-screen was typified by contradictions as well, specifically the conflict between her attitude to her personal life and her attitude to her professional life.

The slender, petite Sullavan (she was 5 feet 2½ inches tall) was born in Virginia in 1909. Originally she wanted to be a dancer before drifting into acting. She was by all accounts an active, athletic, tomboyish woman (she sometimes rode a motorcycle to the studio) described by her friend James Stewart, with whom she made four movies, as having "great humor." Henry Fonda (to whom she was married briefly, for about two months, in the early 1930s) agreed, calling her a "fun-loving" woman that "everybody loved": "There sure wasn't anybody who didn't fall under her spell."

Yet she had a very serious attitude toward her acting. She seemed to be driven more by a sense of professionalism than by personal ambition and found the trappings of celebrity a bothersome intrusion in her life. Her interest in movie acting apparently ended when the scene was finished; she never watched the daily rushes and never saw any of her completed movies. When her children insisted on seeing her last movie, No Sad Songs for Me (1950), she drove them to Radio City Music Hall in New York, where the film was playing, and waited for them outside the theater until the movie was over.

In 1934, during the filming of The Good Fairy, Sullavan eloped with her director, William Wyler. Quickly realizing the marriage had been a mistake, they divorced a little over a year later. In late 1936 she married Leland Hayward, a high-powered New York and Hollywood talent agent who had been her own agent since 1931. Between 1937 and 1941 they had three children, and in 1943 Sullavan retired from the screen to concentrate on her family. Hayward was apparently a compulsive workaholic, and his devotion to work placed a certain amount of strain on the marriage, with Sullavan feeling that he favored his career over her and the children.

After she stopped making movies, Sullavan's life was not always a happy one. The sense of fun that James Stewart and Henry Fonda noted sometimes crossed the line into capricious behavior, as her impetuous early marriages to Fonda and Wyler suggest. In 1945, against the wishes of her husband, she bought a ninety-five acre farm in Connecticut and moved the family there, isolating her husband, who hated the farm, in California for long periods of time. Then in 1947, ignoring the advice of friends who were aware of problems in the marriage, she suddenly decided to do a six-month tour of England in The Voice of the Turtle, a play she'd had great success with on Broadway a couple of years earlier. During this time Hayward, left alone, began an affair with the ex-wife of Howard Hawks, and after Sullavan returned from England they divorced.

Besides the end of her marriage to Leland Hayward, Sullavan experienced several other setbacks in her personal life in the late 1940s and 1950s. She suffered from a hearing disorder called otosclerosis, which, although treated surgically, still led to progressively greater hearing loss. Two of her three children suffered psychological troubles, evidently exacerbated by the divorce, and were at times hospitalized in psychiatric institutions. As teenagers these two became estranged from their mother, who had doted on them when they were younger, and chose to live instead with their father.

Although Sullavan appeared in several successful plays in the 1940s and 1950s, notably John Van Druten's The Voice of the Turtle and Samuel Taylor's Sabrina Fair, she became more and more ambivalent toward her profession and no longer found in it sufficient inspiration for the total commitment she felt was required. This growing disenchantment with performing ("I loathe acting," she is quoted as saying when she began rehearsals in late 1959 for what would have been her last Broadway play)—along with increasing problems with her hearing and what her daughter Brooke Hayward calls "the terrible anxiety that she had failed as a mother"—led to years of worsening insomnia and depression. Margaret Sullavan died of an overdose of barbiturates on New Year's Day 1960. There were indications that the overdose was unintentional, enough so for the coroner to rule her death accidental.

I think Henry Fonda was right when he described Margaret Sullavan as "unique," something that comes through clearly in the characters she played in her brief movie career. Perhaps because Sullavan's later life was so sad, The Good Fairy seems all the more special. In this movie she is exuberant and fresh, genuinely so, almost beyond what is called for in her role. The innocent, optimistic character of Luisa was the ideal showcase for the youthful sense of fun and energy that those who knew Margaret Sullavan described her as having as a young woman, enchanting qualities that are on full display in The Good Fairy and that make the movie so delightful.

All the quoted material and much of the biographical information come from the memoir written by Margaret Sullavan's daughter, Brooke Hayward, Haywire (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1977).

Have Yourself a Merry Lubitsch Christmas

A number of years ago, while visiting relatives for the Christmas holiday, I took advantage of their cable TV, with its several Los Angeles stations, to watch movies. One night a movie that I had read about called The Shop Around the Corner (1940) was playing. I had never seen a film directed by Ernst Lubitsch, although I had heard much about the "Lubitsch touch," nor had I ever seen the actress Margaret Sullavan in anything, although I also knew of her. I fell in love with this movie as I watched it. One of my first reactions was to ask myself why, when the last part of the film takes place during the Christmas season, wasn't it as well known as those two other holiday perennials Miracle on 34th Street and It's a Wonderful Life. The Shop Around the Corner is every bit as good as those two Christmas favorites and, having fewer serious overtones, is in many ways even more likable.

The Shop Around the Corner, set in Budapest and based on a play by the Hungarian playwright Miklós László, is about two people working in the same shop who loathe each other but unknowingly are secret pen pals conducting a romance by mail. The premise was so successful that it has since been recycled several times. It was Americanized and musicalized by MGM for Judy Garland and Van Johnson as In the Good Old Summertime (1949). In 1963 it was returned to its original setting as the Broadway musical She Loves Me, with music and lyrics by Sheldon Harnick and Jerry Bock, the team responsible for Fiddler on the Roof. In 1998 the story was then updated for the Meg Ryan-Tom Hanks movie You've Got Mail, with snail mail replaced by e-mail.

In the original version, the leads are played by James Stewart and Margaret Sullavan, and I cannot praise their performances highly enough. Alfred Kralik (Stewart) is the chief salesperson in a shop owned by Hugo Matuschek (Frank Morgan) that seems to sell high-end gifts and trinkets. Although Matuschek owns the store, Kralik is its de facto manager. Stewart plays Kralik as an intelligent man with a naturally shrewd business sense and quick, infallible business judgment. While Matuschek sequesters himself in his office brooding about the possible unfaithfulness of his attractive, frivolous, and apparently younger wife, Kralik runs the store, making all the business decisions and managing the staff, while officially deferring to Mutscheck's final judgment in these matters.

Kralik is as good with people as he is at merchandising. Secure enough in himself to be that rarity, an egoless staff manager, he enjoys friendly relations with everyone working in the store, all of whom recognize and respond to his wisdom and modest self-confidence. Only the vain and self-important Ferencz Vadas (Joseph Schildkraut), a clerk of lesser abilities but greater ego and ambition than Kralik, a man disliked by the rest of the staff for his cold personality, fails to respond to Kralik but instead behaves like an envious rival.

Kralik is a lonely man longing for romance, which is why he first answers a notice in the newspaper placed by a young woman seeking a pen pal. Kralik soon finds a soul mate in his anonymous correspondent, someone that he bonds with intellectually and eventually falls in love with. When a jobless young woman, Klara Novak (Sullavan), comes into the store one day looking for work, Kralik not only has no job to offer but also takes an instant dislike to the forthright Klara. This is one of the few times his instinctive good judgment about people fails him, for it is soon revealed that she is his anonymous soul mate. When Klara talks herself into a job in the store by demonstrating her very capable sales ability to Matuschek, who is taken with her charm and good looks even though he doesn't need another salesperson, the stage is set for much droll dramatic irony, with Kralik and Klara bickering and feuding in person at work and romancing each other by mail in their spare time.

At the time this picture was released, Stewart was at a high point in his career. In 1939 and 1940 he gave the four best performances of his early career: in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (for which he received the New York Film Critics award as Best Actor), Destry Rides Again, The Philadelphia Story (for which he received an Oscar), and this movie. In each of these roles he shows the same outward gentleness and inner strength that would characterize his screen personality for the next fifty years.

The great character actor Frank Morgan, fresh off of playing the Wizard in The Wizard of Oz, plays the owner of the store, Matuschek, and he is simply wonderful in what is my favorite of his many fine character performances. His impersonation of this overwrought, insecure man driven to distraction over the infidelity of his wife is a marvel—funny and pathetic at the same time. As a businessman, the blustering Matuschek is hopelessly inept, and it is clear from the imprudent business decisions he makes on his own or when he capriciously overrides Kralik's judgment that without Kralik the business would be lost. Morgan makes this bumbling, frazzled nervous wreck of a man not only humorous but ultimately quite touching as well.

Margaret Sullavan, who plays Klara, was one of the most unique movie actresses of the 1930's and 1940's. Between 1933 and 1943 she made sixteen films then seemed to fade from the screen. Four of her movies also starred James Stewart, with whom she had acted in a stock theater company before coming to Hollywood. Sullavan had a fey, eccentric quality that is difficult to describe and projected an odd combination of vulnerability and resolve, whimsicality and earnestness. She had a breathy voice and a manner of delivering her lines that was alternately rushed and halting. She was as idiosyncratic as Katherine Hepburn without being quite so quirky. (Interestingly, Sullavan was cast in the lead in Stage Door but was replaced by Hepburn when she became pregnant.) All of these qualities, in addition to a well-honed sense of comic timing, come through in her Klara. She works exceptionally well with Stewart, and when together onscreen they make it easy to see how the same qualities in their characters that appeal to each other in their letters—their seriousness, intelligence, outer self-confidence, and inner yearning for connection—are exactly the qualities that cause such a clash of personalities when they are at the store.

Much has been written about "the Lubitsch touch," and the terms most often used to describe it are chic and sophisticated. It is true that many—perhaps even most—of Lubitsch's films concern royalty and aristocrats, the very wealthy, suave conmen and conwomen, artists, and playboys. They generally have a Continental setting—Paris, London, the French Riviera. Yet none of this applies to The Shop Around the Corner. While not uneducated or unintelligent, these men and women are petit bourgeois who work in a shop, far from the rich and sophisticated people in movies like Trouble in Paradise and Design for Living. Even its Budapest setting lacks the romance and glamor of the settings of most of Lubitsch's other movies.

"In the well-mannered, good-natured world of Ernst Lubitsch," wrote Andrew Sarris in The American Cinema, "grace transcends purpose." Roger Ebert, giving his own definition of the elusive "Lubitsch touch," wrote that "the comic material is given dignity by the actors." This prizing above all else of dignity, good manners, and grace is for me the constant in Lubitsch's movies—including The Shop Around the Corner—no matter what the setting or the social station of the characters. To Lubitsch the most important thing in life is to maintain grace, self-composure, and mannerly behavior in even the most trying circumstances. When the personal relationships among the three main characters in Trouble in Paradise fail to work out, all accept the situation with dignity and manage to forge an accommodation to their changed circumstances. In Design for Living, Gary Cooper and Fredric March react to their treatment by Miriam Hopkins—her refusal to commit herself to one or the other, her playing them against each other, and her ultimate rejection of them for an older millionaire—in a similarly graceful and civilized way and in the end reach a most unusual accommodation with her.

In Lubitsch's world view, both communism (Ninotchka) and fascism (To Be or Not to Be) are enemies of dignity and grace. The glacial Ninotchka is a flawed person because she mistakes asceticism for dignity. When she thaws out and permits herself to learn about pleasure, she acquires genuine dignity, and her rigid formality is transformed into relaxed gracefulness. The cruelty and inhumanity of the Nazis in To Be or Not to Be are also antithetical to Lubitsch's values. For him grace is linked absolutely to kindness, forgiveness, and acceptance of the imperfections and inconstancy of human nature.

One of the most difficult and frustrating experiences in life is to be helpless in the face of unjust accusation. For Lubitsch the proper reaction to this situation is the nearly impossible one of acceptance and the maintenacnce of grace under stress. In The Shop Around the Corner, Kralik's equanimity is tested when he is placed in just such a situation. When the private detective Matuschek hires reports that the person with whom his wife is having an affair is one of the employees of his shop, Matuschek mistakenly jumps to the conclusion that the culprit is Kralik (it is actually the arrogant Vadas) and fires him. Kralik reacts to his unjust treatment by Matuschek—in a sense, a betrayal and rejection by a father figure—with disappointment but also with grace and good manners, not outrage or anger, as most people would. He doesn't protest his innocence or indulge in self-pity, and Stewart makes this uncomplaining acceptance of injustice seem completely believable.

Kralik is further tested when later in the film Matuschek impulsively tries (unsuccessfully) to commit suicide and is hospitalized for a nervous breakdown. It is Kralik who immediately goes to his bedside and then loyally returns to run the business and conceal the truth about Matuschek's suicide attempt to protect his reputation. The importance of grace in Lubitsch's—and Kralik's—world view also explains Kralik's disapproving reaction to Klara, for it is Klara's brashness and her less than gracious attitude towards Kralik that initially cause him to dislike her. This intolerance of the lack of grace in others is perhaps the one flaw in Kralik's own devotion to that quality. It is only when he is able to perceive Klara's inner grace, a trait openly expressed only in her letters, that Kralik is able to accept her and acknowledge his love for her.

One of the most delightful things about The Shop Around the Corner is the way Lubitsch creates in the atmosphere of the shop and the interaction of its employees the feeling that these people are in a way a large family. Matuschek is the father, Kralik the wise and faithful son, Vadas the ungrateful and disloyal prodigal son, the errand boy Pepi the impudent but endearing youngest son, the other salespeople in the store kindly aunts and uncles, and Klara the orphaned young woman adopted by the family. Roger Ebert noted about the people in Lubitsch's films that "you find that you believe in these characters and care about them." The family dynamic of The Shop Around the Corner, applied to a closed group of people who are enacted by enormously appealing performers, draws the viewer in and creates tremendous emotional investment in the problems of these people and their ultimate resolution.

When all the disparate elements of a movie slot together flawlessly to provide a fully satisfying and entertaining experience, that to me is a definition of movie greatness. The Shop Around the Corner is just such a movie, an impeccable example of the unpretentious artistry that the best Hollywood studio movies and the best studio directors like the great Ernst Lubitsch were capable of achieving. Add to its other virtues a strong Christmas component, and you have a perfect holiday movie.