1998's You've Got Mail (Starring Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan) was based on an 1940's Shop Around the Corner (Starring Jimmie Stewart and Margaret Sullavan) in that that they share a core conceit (Two characters who dislike eachother in real life have unwittingly fallen in love via anonymous correspondence) and a few set pieces (Such as the restaurant scene).

All things considered, You've Got Mail is the better movie by virtue of better execution the main concept. Shop Around the Corner was itself based on a stageplay,, so while the secondary characters are far more memorable (Pirovitch was charming, while his counterpart appears only in two scenes, and Vadas was a masterful example of characters one loves to hate.) and there are more developed subplots. In fact, these subplots seem to form a whole second plot that runs parallel to and competes with the love story.

You've Got Mail cuts out the fat, focusing entirely on the love story and giving more time to developing the relationship. We get to see much more of the anonymous correspondence, and the conflict between them in real-life is far heightened. The weakness of the conflict in Shop Around the Corner is a flaw made worse by the mis-casting of Jimmie Stewart as the male lead. The movie expects us to somehow believe that Jimmie Stewart is seen as a soulless, materialist, bougious manager-type.

However, the love story in Shop Around the Corner has an interesting, almost prophetic element that is lacking from You've Got Mail. In the 1998 film, the leads are anonymous to each other because they met in a chat room and wanted to keep things casual. It is the opposite in Shop Around the Corner, where the correspondence began after Margaret Sullavan's character put an ad in the paper seeking out an anonymous pen pall with the stated goal of not sharing any "mundane" personal details that would get in the way getting to know the true person. What she needed to learn was that the mundane details of a person's life is the true person, and it was the personality presented in the cultivated letters that was shown to be false.

The older film foreshadowed an aspect of today's culture, where people often place more value on their online persona than their real lives.

Unrelated, but on my watching of You've Got Mail I picked up on a weird incest vibe. Joe's Grandfather, who it was established had been married multiple times to younger women, recognized Kathleen's mother and described her as "Enchanting." I kept expecting this to develop into a horrible plot twist but nothing came of it.