D Gary Grady

Frank Morgan, the former ruler of Oz, now owns a luggage and leather goods shop in Budapest. His best employee is Jimmy Stewart, who has an annoying tendency to disagree with him and — worse — usually turns out to be right.

There’s also an older family man on the staff who carefully avoids rocking any boats. When he hears the boss ask for an honest opinion he finds a place to hide. At one point he tells Stewart that the boss “picks on me too. The other day he called me an idiot. What could I do? I said, ‘Yes, Mr Matuschek, I’m an idiot.’ I’m no fool!”

There’s also a dapper womanizer in spats, a wise-ass young errand boy, and a couple of other salespeople. Morgan complains his employees don’t appreciate the fact that he employs a staff of six when bigger stores make do with four.

So when Margaret Sullavan shows up desperate for a job, Stewart sympathetically tells her there’s no hope. But when she take it on herself to sell one of the musical cigarette boxes Stewart told him were a bad idea, Morgan is delighted enough to hire her anyway.

From that point Sullavan and Stewart manage to get on each other’s nerves, so if you’ve ever seen a movie you know there’s going to be a romance.

In fact, they already have one in progress; they just don’t know it. Some weeks before Stewart responded to a personals ad in a local newspaper and ever since he’s been enjoying a delightful correspondence with a woman finds immensely appealing, though he doesn’t even know her name, just her post office box number. The woman is Sullavan, of course, and her feelings are running in the same direction. Both are counting the days until they can finally meet in person.

It’s a blatantly contrived situation, of course, but the main characters are so likable and the dialog so witty that the movie is a lot of fun. It’s based on a popular Hungarian stage play, Illatszertár (The Perfume Shop) by Miklós László, as reflected in the Budapest setting. It was adapted several more times as well to different eras and locales, including the films In the Good Old Summertime (1949) with Van Johnson and Judy Garland and You’ve Got Mail (1998) with Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan. It eventually made it back to the stage as well in the form of the Broadway musical She Loves Me.

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I found myself initially a bit confused about who was who in this film, but I liked it enough that I watched it twice and enjoyed it more the second time. It’s based on a lightweight Oscar Wilde play and the comedy is at times so understated that the funny bits can sneak past unnoticed if you’re not paying enough attention.

It’s the late 1890s and Jeremy Northam is a wealthy member of parliament universally admired for his integrity. His politically active wife, Cate Blanchett, adores him for it, because she values honesty above all. To her he’s an ideal husband, and he returns her love with equal intensity.

Northam’s best friend is Rupert Everett, who’s honest enough to declare himself the idlest man in London, a fact that irritates the dickens out of his father, a stodgy earl with a sense of noblesse oblige who serves in the government and wants his son to get married and makes something of himself. Everett finds the idea appalling.

Northam’s sister, Minnie Driver, is smart, sophisticated, and witty and yet likes Everett just as he is, except that she’s getting impatient for him to show some romantic interest in her.

Things are going along more or less smoothly until the recently widowed Julianne Moore arrives. She and Blanchett are former schoolmates but not friends, and she and Everett had years before been engaged for a few weeks until she learned that an even wealthier Austrian nobleman had come on the market. But it’s Northam she wants to see: Thanks to her late husband she has evidence of Northam’s one ethical lapse, news of which would ruin his career and his marriage should she divulge it. In return for her silence, she wants Northam to turn in a favorable report to the government on a crooked canal scheme he’s been asked to investigate, and in which she’s heavily invested.

The screenplay improves on Wilde’s original plot, which depended on a strained gimmick to save the day. There are implausibilities in the film as well, but they’re more tolerable.

The film also makes numerous in-joke references to Wilde’s other plays and personal life. At one point Everett wears a green carnation in his lapel, something that had been used by Wilde and others as a secret signal of their homosexuality. Everett himself happens to be gay.

Incidentally, Minnie Driver does a lot of over-the-top comic mugging in this film, but she gets away with it. Then again, I’m biased. I’d likely have found her charming if she made ugly faces at the camera and talked like Batman.

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