Hiding in plain sight : anonymity across adaptations of Miklos Laszlo's Illatszertar (Parfumerie)
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Director Ernst Lubitsch's romantic comedy film The Shop Around the Corner has inspired multiple adaptations since its release in 1940. In it, two shop clerks fall in love through anonymous letters while detesting each other in their daily lives. Lubitsch's film is adapted from Hungarian playwright Miklos Laszlo's 1936 play Illatszertar (translated as Parfumerie). However, Lubitsch and screenwriter Samson Raphaelson made radical revisions to Laszlo's original text when adapting it for the American silver screen. Importantly, the changes which reimagine Laszlo's chamber play as a romantic comedy fundamentally alter the function of anonymity within the narrative. Where anonymity is the central conceit of Laszlo's situational irony, the play's translation into romantic comedy instead extends anonymity in service of dramatic and structural ironies which fundamentally alter the balance of power between the male and female protagonists. Importantly, Lubitsch's retelling has since usurped Laszlo's original text as the urtext for subsequent adaptations, and so this altered balance of narrative potency is retained through the latter half of the twentieth century in the 1963 musical She Loves Me and the 1998 film You've Got Mail. This project analyzes the function of anonymity in Parfumerie and maps its functional shift in The Shop Around the Corner as well as that adaptation's influence on successive adaptations.
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M.A.