Shoes

I liked this film, despite it's crippling age and obviously lame acting. For starters, it's called Shoes, and that's reason enough to recommend any film. It's quite a heartwarming tale too, and even my tattooed heart of lead melted a bit at it's touching scenes. A remake of this would be worryingly irrelevant now, as shoes aren't such a luxury purchase nowadays, but with a bit of reworking, this early classic could easily rake in money for some feckless student layabout.

I have to hand it to Lois Weber; it's remarkable she made an exquisite film that revolves around shoes. An entire five-reels, feature-length film elaborating footwear--it's a staggering feat of simplicity, from their centrality before the cinematographic gaze to the social-problem narrative that envelopes them. There are plentiful close-ups--even a brief tracking shot, as they hit the pavement on the way to work at a five-and-dime store--of the protagonist's ragged pair, as she tends them with cardboard soles and punished by the distress they inflict on her, their frailty in the rain and momentary relief upon carpet, their comparison with finer heels and the boots she longs for in the shop window, the dreams of escaping poverty, or class aspirations, that extend from them, and the indictment purchasing new ones reveals. There are people in the film, too, for who else is to gaze at the shoes in the picture's eyeline match cutting and fetishize the apparel beyond consumerism into an entire morality tale, but it's, indeed, the shoes that are the stars of this one.

The Milestone home video release of "Shoes" includes an informative commentary track from Shelley Stamp, who also wrote at length on this and other Weber titles in her book, "Lois Weber in Early Hollywood." As Stamp points out, the picture alternates between different gazes. The gaze of the Progressive reformer like Weber and Jane Addams, for whose book is opened with the film's opening, as if the film were a sociological record (albeit a dramatized one based on a "Collier" magazine story, which in turn was based on the work of Addams). Then, there's cinematic identification with the subjective experience of the protagonist Eva (Mary MacLaren) and her gaze. This female gaze and desire for shoes and the dreams of wealth providing an escape from her wage labor is further contrasted with the lecherous male gaze of "Cabaret" Charlie, as well as the idle gaze upon dime novels of her father (talk about a notion of a deadbeat dad that has become quaint--spending his days idly reading and smoking a pipe), the former whose gaze she avoids with her own and the latter for whom she stares at with contempt.

Indeed, and despite its Progressive message on female shop clerks, or that the film was made by working women, the sexual mores of "Shoes" are very much of 1916. Inviting moviegoers, as Stamp says, "to endorse women's wage equity through an appeal to traditional notions of feminine sexual purity and the dangers (physical and sexual) of women's presence in the workforce." Thus, Eva is identified as her family's breadwinner because her father has failed in the responsibility, and her place in the workforce is further complicated by consumerism and lustful men. MacLaren plays Eva with one of the most consistently miserable expressions I've ever seen on screen, and her story is quite a pitiful tragedy of not earning enough to support her family and her feet and thereby eventually prostituting herself for the new shoes. This much the title cards inform us at the film's outset, but it's the picture's final irony on top of this that fully realizes the initial consistent aim of the picture for a poetic gut punch.

The social problems addressed in Weber's oeuvre interests me less than the craft that goes into the lectures. I tend to find her decidedly Christian and Progressive proselytizing a hindrance (if not downright repugnant, such as the pro-eugenics message of "Where Are My Children?" (1916)) to what otherwise are artistically sophisticated pictures. In that respect, I prefer her earlier one-reelers, which seem to have more often explored art and genre more than they did social commentary. After her return to Universal and the epic of an exception in "The Dumb Girl of Portici" (1916), Weber seems to have almost fully committed to social-problem and moral domestic dramas, including with topics often ripped right from contemporary newspaper headlines: besides abortion and birth control in the confused dichotomy of eugenics in "Where Are My Children?" and birth control again as inspired by Margaret Sanger in "The Hand That Rocks the Cradle" (1917), drug addiction in "Hop, the Devil's Brew," capital punishment as based on the case of Charles Stielow in "The People vs. John Doe" (both 1916), Christian Science and alcoholism in "Jewel" (1915) and its remake "A Chapter in Her Life" (1923), and tackling the subject of shopgirls and consumerism again in "The Price of a Good Time" (1917), plus more on class and shoes in "The Blot" (1921).

Some of the worst aspects of these films seem to creep up here, too. The sobriety of the acting and subject matter, the wordy title cards that are sometimes worthy of eye rolling, such as this clog of a sexual metaphor: "This flower had not had a fair chance to bloom in the garden of life. The worm of poverty had entered the folded bud and spoiled it." Furthermore, while the settings have received credit for their realistic recreation, the missing fourth walls are especially evident in such a small-scale drama the repeatedly returns to the same places. But, it's a nice-looking film, appreciably restored, well constructed visually, and the lecturing isn't as cumbersome as it would become by, say, "The Blot," with its emphasis on a particularly genteel form of poverty and the self-serving message of paying lecturers and preachers better. I love the broken mirror shot here of Eva, too, as she dresses to trade sex for shoes, her soul for better support of her soles. Yet, it's the shoes that standout, how they're photographed, gazed upon and how the story extends from them.

A young woman living with her family and just barely getting by desperately needs a new pair of shoes, because hers are literally falling apart. It's a pretty simple story, but director Lois Weber really shows us the hardship of the woman's position, preyed on by a man who's willing to give her money for sex, and taken advantage of by her own father, who lays on his ass while she's out working. It has the perspective of the working poor at a time when the wealth gap was quite large in America (similar to today), as well as a woman's perspective, living in a male dominated world. For those things it's a pretty special thing to see out of a film from 1916, and Weber adds a few nice touches, such as a scene of her dreaming and an ominous hand labeled Poverty reaching out ominously over Mary MacLaren's character. The fact that she has to hide what she's done from her father who would kill her is a cruel irony, and I loved how Weber shows us non-judgmental empathy - the thing is done, it was done out of necessity, and life goes on, instead of the woman suffering a fate worse than death, as in so many other stories from this period.

Sorry that I can't figure out how to submit this as a correction of data on this film.

The credit should go not to a "novel" by the great social reformer Jane Addams, but rather to her "treatise," "A New Conscience and an Ancient Evil" (New York: Macmillan, 1912), which gives her findings and reflections on the records of the Juvenile Protection Agency of Chicago and court proceedings . This is the title on the spine of the book shown in the film.

An electronic version in Project Gutenberg is available.

Here is the passage from "A New Conscience and an Ancient Evil" that Weber's film quotes in part at the beginning, and which is then developed in the screenplay:

"Yet factory girls who are subjected to this overstrain and overtime often find their greatest discouragement in the fact that after all their efforts they earn too little to support themselves. One girl said that she had first yielded to temptation when she had become utterly discouraged because she had tried in vain for seven months to save enough money for a pair of shoes. She habitually spent two dollars a week for her room, three dollars for her board, and sixty cents a week for carfare, and she had found the forty cents remaining from her weekly wage of six dollars inadequate to do more than re-sole her old shoes twice. When the shoes became too worn to endure a third soling and she possessed but ninety cents towards a new pair, she gave up her struggle; to use her own contemptuous phrase, she 'sold out for a pair of shoes.'"

Shopgirl Mary MacLaren works at the Five-and-Dime in shoes so worn out she resorts to using cardboard inserts. Her dad is a lazy goodfernuthin so Mary's 5 bucks a week from the store pays for everything. Her poverty is so crushing it even visits her in her sleep (in what must have been a terrifying scene in 1916).

MacLaren is asked to carry nearly every scene and she's up to the task. She has to convey every-increasing despair at ever getting a new pair of shoes, and boiling resentment of her father.

It's a story about longing to escape poverty, yes. It's also a proto-feminist movie from sadly overlooked film pioneer Lois Weber. Mary works very hard without complaint. She comes home to her starving family. Her useless father. And then there's the skeezie guy from the nightclub who becomes her faint hope.

It's not a spoiler to point out what she has to do to finally get those shoes (they tell us in the opening credits!). Other reviewers have mentioned the cracked mirror scene prior to the dance but even knowing it was coming it was crushing. Her mother's heartache after the dance was even moreso. When mama helps Mary pull herself together for dinner, then The End. Wow.

The shoes are a metaphor for everything a woman of the working class might have hoped for in 1916. And sadly, often must have resorted to, in order to obtain it.

TCM tells us that Shoes was once considered a lost film until three versions were patched together in 2016. Thanks goodness for film preservationists.