Celebrating "The Shop Around the Corner" on its 80th Birthday

Today marks the 80^th anniversary of the premiere of what has been called Ernst Lubitsch’s “most discreet tour de force of art concealing art,” The Shop Around the Corner (1940).

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ANOTHER BIG SCREEN ADVENTURE…AND…A BOOK GIVEAWAY

 WIN A COPY OF VICTORIA RISKIN’S NEW BOOK, FAY WRAY AND ROBERT RISKIN: A HOLLYWOOD MEMOIR (PANTHEON 2019) ...details at end of post...

On a Wednesday afternoon at the end of February, I slogged through the rain, my car moving at a crawl across a bridge mired in traffic, to the east side of the San Francisco Bay. Into wild and woolly Berkeley, California, I drove. Berkeley, that university town known far and wide for its political uprisings, fine school and lingering spirit of the late 1960s. But my visit on that rainy day had nothing to do with politics or school, though it did have something to do with a bygone era. I was on my way to see a movie, a very special screening at Berkeley’s Pacific Film Archive of one of Hollywood’s great classics, a quintessential romp of a romantic comedy released at the tail-end of the Pre-Code era, It Happened One Night (1934).