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.
