My final installment in the Movie Blog is one of my all-time favorites. If you haven't seen this movie, you're really missing out. Unrequited love, secret love affairs, money thrown around, infidelity, attempted suicide, recession, job loss, and true love that conquers all. Yes, really! This little movie from 1940 packs a punch...and ends up being so completely and utterly current even though it's 70 years old. And you know, I think it says a lot about the movie experiment in general.
Like all of the best movies I have watched this year, the topics are varied, the acting is superb and the movie itself was quality all the way through. The movie was actually remade into another movie I watched this year - "You've Got Mail" starring Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan. While those two actors charm the living heck out of me, there's just no matching the original.
In this movie, Jimmy Stewart plays Alfred Kralik - head shop clerk at Matuschek and Co. who is corresponding with a woman who he doesn't actually know. They fall in love through letters, talking about things that matter to them like ideals and literature. One day, a woman named Klara Novak walks into the store and weasles her way into a job there. She becomes Kralik's worst nightmare. She second-guesses him, insults him, and generally makes his life miserable. Of course Novak, played by Margaret Sullivan, ends up being the secret love interest of Kralik. He sees her one predestined evening in a cafe holding a copy of Anna Karina with a little red carnation in it. Kralik discovers this and begins to try and smooth things over with Novak, even becoming a very important person in her life - and someone she can envision spending the rest of her life with. When he unveils the fact that he is...well, him...the response is met with great joy. Who doesn't love a happy ending? The perfect note on which to end this fabulous experiment.
The IMDB Link
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