“As for human comedy,” wrote Lubitsch in 1947, “I think I never was as good as in Shop Around the Corner. Never did I make a picture in which the atmosphere and the characters were truer than in this picture.” Although his art is often described in terms of social satire, verbal wit, and elegant mise-en-scène, Lubitsch was himself an actor once, in love with its honorable pretense. What makes the love story here so intelligent and touching is the very way in which the lovers (James Stewart and Margaret Sullavan, coworkers in a Budapest shop who don't realize that they are secret pen pals) confuse their ideal, role-playing sense of themselves with the reality. Caught up in parts, they cannot easily recognize their natural partners. The shop is a sufficient world, full of instinctive familiarity and sublime misunderstandings; its natural comedy is all the greater in that no “comedian” is in the cast.