Shoes (1916 film)


Shoes is a 1916 silent film drama directed by Lois Weber and starring Mary MacLaren. It was distributed by the Universal Film Manufacturing Company and produced by a subsidiary called Bluebird Photoplays. Shoes was added to the National Film Registry in 2014.
The film was held and restored by the EYE Film Institute Netherlands between 2008-2011. It is available on DVD and Blu-ray with a score by Donald Sosin and Mimi Rabson and audio commentary from film historian Shelley Stamp.

Background and release

published her short story "Shoes" in Collier's magazine as part of its January 1, 1916 issue. The story follows a shop girl named Eva Mayers as she fights against poverty, captured in her struggle to simply buy a new pair of shoes. The story takes inspiration from Jane Addams's nonfiction book on prostitution A New Conscience and an Ancient Evil, which Herron quotes for her epigraph:
“When the shoes became too worn to endure a third soling and she possessed but 90 cents toward a new pair, she gave up the struggle; to use her own contemptuous phrase, she ‘sold out for a new pair of shoes.’”
Weber adapted the story herself, and she did so closely, with "dialogue from the story occasionally appearing verbatim in the film’s intertitles." Released on June 26, 1916, the film received widespread critical and public acclaim, becoming Universal's most-booked Bluebird production that year.

Cast

uncredited
Eva Meyer works in a dime store for a few dollars a week, but must solely support her family of two parents and three sisters because her father prefers to lie in bed reading rather than looking for work. Eva desperately needs a new pair of shoes - her old ones are falling to pieces and she is reduced to cutting out and fitting cardboard soles every evening. Finally, with no other alternative, Eva sleeps with "Cabaret" Charlie, a singer, in exchange for money. She buys new shoes, after which she learns that her father has found work.