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.

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.

Eva Mayer earns $5 a week in a five and ten cent store. She is struggling to support her parents and three younger sisters. She grows tired of her lazy father and ungrateful family. She dreams of the high life but she can't even afford to replace her worn out shoes. "She sold herself for a pair of shoes."

There is shock value to the opening text. The premise is poetic and outrageous at the same time. I do wonder if the film is trivializing something but one must admit that people are willing to do the wrong things for relatively small reasons.. The final ending is simply more tragic poetry which does leave this feeling a little bit false. There is an appeal to this story despite its simplified construction. This was added to the National Film Registry in 2014.

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.'"

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.