A plain, ordinary, and somewhat dumpy little man lives alone with his little mutt dog in a shabby apartment in an urban section of Brooklyn. One day, while walking the streets and looking into store windows, he sees a pair of shoes that he feels will change his appearance and hence, his social life. -
After purchasing the shoes, he goes home, gets cleaned up, dressed up, and goes out with his new shoes on. He goes to a depressing, almost empty diner/luncheonette and meets an equally unattractive and dumpy-looking female.
Emboldened by his new shoes, he strikes up a conversation with her and even dances with her to a tune on the juke box. While seated in a booth, we can see under the table that she is skuffing his new shoes with the soles of her shoes. -
After this encounter, he returns home and polishes his new shoes before going to bed. In the morning, when a garbage truck comes to pick up the building's trash, the man's little dog grabs the shoes in his teeth and takes them downstairs and places them by the garbage pail. The garbageman picks them up, throws them in the pail, then empties the garbage pail into the truck. The truck drives away. The shoes are gone.
When the man wakes and realizes that the dog took his shoes, he runs downstairs and looks both ways on the street for the garbage truck, but it's long gone. He slowly walks back upstairs where his little mutt is waiting for him.
This 25 minute film is mostly without dialog, except for the meeting in the diner. All through the film we see how much the dog loves this lonely man. We have to wonder if this devoted little dog, seeing how the new shoes got the man out of their home to meet another person, actually got rid of the shoes to keep the man home with him.
I saw this film on TCM recently. It was screened on a week-end evening, following TCM's premier showing of Powell & Pressburger's famous 1948 classic "The Red Shoes". I looked for "The Shoes" on the IMDb to find out more, but could not find it listed under it's title, nor was it listed under the name of it's star, Buddy Hackett.
I then looked in an old 2-volume set of books I own, titled "Forty Years of Screen Credits". It lists all the film titles for every actor who appeared in anything on the screen between 1929 and 1969 (I bought this 2-volume set in 1970). Well, low & behold, "The Shoes" was listed under Buddy Hackett's name, with a release date of 1961. - I then wrote to IMDb to try to get it listed, and after several months wait, it has finally made it here!
Fortunately I taped BOTH "The Red Shoes" plus this short film, "The Shoes", on the night TCM showed them, so I was able to get this short film's production credits to send to IMDb simply by looking at my own tape recording of it.
