To avoid confusion, this is the James Stewart Christmas movie that was remade as You’ve Got Mail, not the James Stewart Christmas movie that was remade as Gremlins.

Set in a Budapest leatherware Shop, this 1940 romcom follows two adversarial salespeople (Stewart and Margaret Sullavan) unknowingly engaged in a romantic correspondence. It combines Hawksian bickering with social realism, lending real stakes to the refreshing lack of Hollywood glamour. Where It’s a Wonderful Life lays on its Christmas schmaltz with a turkey baster, The Shop Around the Corner takes a more grounded view of the holidays (maybe because it’s Jewish).

Directed by Ernst Lubitsch, with a screenplay by Samson Raphaelson and Ben Hecht (His Girl Friday), the picture paints its shop staff as underpaid and overlooked – but does so with a lightness of touch that maintains the festive spirit. Taking place almost entirely in the store, it anticipates retail-based sitcoms like Are You Being Served? and Superstore, focusing on workplace dynamics and unlikely family.

Yet despite only seeing them at work, the characters and their lives feel so real that you don’t even consider the mad coincidence of anonymous pen pals working in the same shop. Stewart and Sullavan have snippy chemistry as the working stiff and his withering staff, their predicament a reminder of how little we know the colleagues with whom we spend so much of our lives. The fact they are so different in their letters as in person is particularly insightful in hindsight, given the impact of anonymity on our online behaviour.

The Shop Around the Corner is a timeless (re)tale about how people have different dimensions; ironically a message that seems antithetical to the modern romcom, where even having a job is seen as a nuisance to be explained away at the earliest opportunity.