Starring: Margaret Sullavan, James Stewart, Frank Morgan, Joseph Schildkraut

Programmer Shay Filmore tackles her watchlist anxiety through the series My First Time. This program features films Shay hasn’t seen but fall into the specific category of “movies you know you’ll probably love, but you hold off seeing because you really want to see them in the theater.”

For the second screening, prepare to get cozy in chilly Budapest for Ernst Lubitsch’s 1940 Christmastime classic The Shop Around the Corner.

Holiday genres are very funny. Every horror film is essentially part of the Halloween canon, yet comparatively few Christmas movies exist. In fact, we are always quick to enthusiastically claim that something is a Christmas movie just because it has one scene set during the holidays (like Lorene Scafaria’s 2019 masterpiece Hustlers). This makes Shay’s oversight even more baffling since there aren’t really that many Christmas films to begin with.

In pre-war Budapest, two employees at a leather goods shop can barely stand each other, without realizing that they are falling in love through the post as each other’s anonymous pen pal.

Join Shay in your favorite holiday attire as she watches The Shop Around the Corner… for the first time!