As legend has it, Weber discovered Mary MacLaren in a long line of screen hopefuls waiting outside Universal gates in 1916. Recognizing “something magnetic” in the young woman’s face, Weber cast MacLar­en, then only 16, in a brief but memo­rable appearance as the maid who rejects unwanted sexual advances in Where Are My Children? A starring role in Shoes fol­lowed, along with several more films with Weber and other top Universal directors. “From Extra to Stardom”, “Motion Picture Magazine” blared in its profile of the ac­tress. In Shoes, Weber’s bleak portrait of urban poverty, MacLaren plays Eva Meyer, a shop girl whose meager earnings sup­port her family. Surrounded by merchan­dise in the store where she works, Eva is unable to participate in the consumer economy her labor supports. Progressive-era reformers worried openly about the fashion tastes and spending habits of underpaid female workers like Eva, as well as the sexual economy spawned by wage inequities between young men and women. Yet even as Shoes shares many of these alarmist concerns, woven through­out the film are moments when we are encouraged to share Eva’s viewpoint, to understand what it means to work hard, to feel ashamed of one’s circumstances and fearful about the future, and to long for one potent symbol of escape – a new pair of shoes.