I did not know that this was a musical remake of "The Shop Around the Corner" or that very little of the movie takes place during the summer months. In fact, like the original, it is more of a Christmas movie. The setting is changed from a parfumerie to a music shop in order to acclimate the songs to the story. The script lightens the story by omitting the darker elements like the shopkeeper's attempted suicide. Judy Garland and Van Johnson are quite good as the leads. The great S.Z. "Cuddles" Sakall was borrowed from Warner Bros. to play the shopkeeper and was worth whatever MGM gave up in return. Buster Keaton was working as a gag writer at MGM and was asked to devise a way for a violin to get broken that would be both comic and plausible. Keaton came up with an appropriate fall, and the filmmakers then realized he was the only one who would be able to execute it properly, so they cast him in the film. While on set Keaton also advised Johnson on the sequence in which he inadvertently wrecks Garland's hat, This was the first MGM film Keaton appeared in since being fired from the studio in 1933.