Shoes is a 1916 film directed by Lois Weber.
Eva Meyer is a young woman who earns $5 a week (even in 1916, not very much) as a clerk in a five-and-dime store. Her father is a shiftless layabout who prefers to lie in bed and read detective novels rather than get a job, so Eva is the sole support for her parents, herself, and her three little sisters.
$5 a week turns to $3 a week after they pay for their shabby apartment, so the Meyers live in poverty. Eva's mom is having a hard time finding meat for the dinner table. Eva has a problem of her own: her shoes are literally falling apart. Eva desperately needs a new pair of shoes, and she has her heart set on a $3 pair sitting in the display window of a store, but after her salary goes to feed six people, there simply isn't enough money left for shoes.
In desperation, Eva takes to cutting out cardboard to make soles for her ratty old shoes. This sort of works, poorly, for a while—until the weather turns to rain, which causes the cardboard soles to fall apart. Suffering from sore feet and catching cold from wet feet, Eva falls into despair.
Enter "Cabaret" Charlie, a singer in a local nightclub who knows Eva and has been casting lewd glances at her. With no other choice, Eva resigns herself to having sex with Charlie in return for the money to buy shoes.
Tropes:
- Death Glare: Eva, who comes home every day with aching feet that she has to soak in hot water, casts one of these at her lazy father after he sits at the dinner table.
- Defiled Forever: Apparently the moral about Eva, after she had sex with Charlie. Lampshaded in the closing title card which says that this "bud" never got the chance to bloom because it was "eaten by worms."
- Downer Ending: Eva is left with a Thousand-Yard Stare of despair, after having prostituted herself for a pair of shoes.
- Establishing Character Moment: We learn all there is to learn about Charlie when we see the lewd and lascivious stare he casts at Eva and her friend Lil on the sidewalk.Lil: Remember that guy that rubbered at us outside the shoe store?
- Gray Rain of Depression: Having to slog to work in a driving rain fits Eva's mood of grim despair, but it's more plot relevant than most examples of this trope, as the rain destroys the cardboard soles of Eva's shoes.
- Imagine Spot: Her desperate poverty causes Eva to occasionally daydream of living in wealth, or, in the last Imagine Spot, to daydream of simply living in the middle class.
- Lazy Bum: Eva's father simply refuses to work, seemingly content to read novels while Eva slaves away.
- Letting Her Hair Down: Played with. When Eva decides to finally bite the bullet and go out with Charlie, she undoes her braid and shakes her long hair loose—but that's so she can put her hair up in an elaborate Gibson Girl style.
- Serious Business: Having sex with a sleazeball in order to buy a pair of shoes isn't really a good thing, but Eva and her mother act like she drowned a baby. Mom tells Eva to never tell her father, because he'd kill her.
- A Tragedy of Impulsiveness: The very next morning after Eva had sex with Charlie to get the money for shoes, her father tells the family that he finally got a job.
- Victoria's Secret Compartment: Eva's heavyset mother keeps the family's meager cash reserve in an envelope in her Compartment.
