Shoes (1916, Lois Weber) (Patreon)

48/100

Been stuck on this one for a couple of days now, because the film qua film didn't much appeal to me, but it’s obviously of significant historical interest* (especially given how little I knew about Weber until quite recently). Guess I’ll be dismissive first: Didacticism and miserabilism is my least favorite combo, and Shoes does little more than lament the plight of the impoverished female worker, even revealing (more or less) at the outset that our ill-shod heroine will eventually turn to sex work in order to protect her feet from the elements. As someone who frequently wears shoes long after they should have been tossed into the trash—generally out of sheer laziness, not a lack of resources—I can definitely empathize with the unpleasant experience of spending hours in damp socks after unexpectedly getting caught in the rain. But there’s just not much else to this downer, which runs under an hour (“feature film” was still a nebulous concept, one year after Birth of a Nation; I imagine this would have been labeled a five-reeler) but spends the vast majority of that time repeating “needs new shoes, can’t afford new shoes” with little in the way of variation. Scenes in which Eva cuts up cardboard boxes with which to line the soles of her worn-out pair, or soaks her feet in a tub of water, have a certain pragmatic pathos, but there’s no getting around how much of this sucker is just Mary MacLaren looking defeated by life. Nor did I love the dark but cheap irony of Eva returning home with her hard-bought shoes to discover that Dad finally got a job.

(Btw, not the movie’s fault, but I was slow to realize that we’re meant to perceive Eva’s father as lazy and useless. Reading is industrious, in my mind, and only after several scenes did it finally dawn on me that wastrels couldn’t sit in front of the TV all day long in 1916. I gather that it’s supposed to be shocking when he brings a book to the dinner table—something I used to do all the time as a young boy, though my parents usually made me put it down. In any case, the no-account loser stereotype looked very different way back then.)

Removing my art/entertainment goggles and donning my amateur-historian specs, I do note that Weber was among those filmmakers experimenting with what this new medium could do (though I’m by no means knowledgeable enough about the silent era to speak confidently about what constituted innovation at any given point). It’s obviously didactic as hell, so see above, but the moment that superimposes a ghostly hand clutching at Eva, the word POVERTY written editorial-cartoon-style along its arm, qualified as galvanizing, I suspect. Possibly the same is true of effects we now take completely for granted, like a match-dissolve from Eva’s beat-up shoes (on her feet) to the pair that she yearns to replace them with, and back again. The most remarkable structural element is a sort of “last temptation” daydream (minus the actual temptation, as there’s no means of effecting it) depicting alternative, happier lives that Eva wishes for herself and her family, ranging from fabulously wealthy to just comfortable. Collectively, this stuff occupies but a handful of minutes, and the film as a whole doesn’t strike me as formally audacious; certainly the tinting—sepia for daytime scenes, blue for nighttime—couldn’t be more standard, and compositions are strictly functional, with minimal camera movement. It’s the despairing message that’s foregrounded. Reading up on Weber, I find that she (a) directed a truly staggering number of highly successful films (relatively few of which survive, but that’s hardly an excuse for the lack of attention she received in my cinema-studies courses ca. the early ‘90s) and (b) viewed moving pictures primarily as a social-improvement mechanism (not for nothing does this one open with an insert of sociologist/activist Jane Addams’ book A New Conscience and an Ancient Evil). Sort of the Ken Loach of cinema’s infancy, then, and I’m hopeful that Shoes will turn out to be her Bread and Roses—that there’s a Kes or a My Name Is Joe or a Land and Freedom awaiting me. Hypocrites sounds particularly intriguing.

* Out of curiosity, I checked to see what had previously been the earliest female-directed feature I’d ever seen. Going year by year, it took a while, as the answer turned out to be The Last Stage, a Polish Holocaust drama helmed by Auschwitz survivor Wanda Jakubowska and released in 1948. Then came Ida Lupino’s Never Fear, from 1950. Haven’t yet investigated Dorothy Arzner, to my considerable shame.