Soles For Sale explorers two themes.
The first is of a young woman wanting to escape from her newly-acquired husband after being suspicious of the man and assuming that he only means her harm.
The second is her than finding a job in the acting business after wandering the desert for a day or so and then stumbling upon a famous actor riding a camel.
(It makes more sense when you see the film.)
Originally I was just going to go for the basics of the film and ignore any of the secondary details exploring some of the negative themes of the film industry. But it's just too prevalent to ignore. The movie straight up acknowledges that most of these poor girls can only get into the theatre because of their looks and most of them will never get far enough to do anything. They'll probably have to sleep their way to the top If they want to get the right role and even then they'll only get a chance at it after some other famous girls been injured on the set by faulty equipment.
I think what makes this film so oddly prevalent is that it's the same issues that people are still dealing with today.
More women than men I'd argue, but they're (Men) not free from this pain either.
Then just to add salt to the wounds a large part of the film is also dedicated to this actresses former husband who's running around the world stealing money from other women and then murdering them before moving on.
Than finding his former wife's picture in a magazine and deciding to head to Hollywood as to reclaim what he considers to be his ''rightful property''.
And the oddest part about the ending is that when she encounters him and friends to kill herself as to not go through the pain of Scandal or returning with this delinquent of a man he backs off claiming that out of all the things in the world he couldn't bear to see it was her killing herself. This horrible disgusting man who just wants to ruin this girl's life simultaneously loves her at the same time. Shows just how screwed up some people can be.
Anyways I don't really want to go through a summary of this film.
For one thing it's relatively simple when you look at the most basic of the story.
Girl escapes bad life, gets into acting, continues to live a subpar life before a happy Coincidence of positive and negative events throwns her into semi Fame. There's also a couple of Oddball romances with various guys who have falling for the girl. The film doesn't play around too much with their romance anyways and it's pretty well clear that she only has love for the one at the end.
This film had a repurposed soundtrack given to it a few years ago. So what has a more modern and dramatic score to go along with the story.
Personally I think it takes away from the charm of the movie, but at the same time it might make it a little bit more accessible to those who hadn't watched any other silent film. It's a great jumping on point if you want to see if you like silent movies or not.
However the dialogue might be problematic for some. I don't know if it's the intention of the original film or if it was edited later on, but the text boxes in this movie have a very old English feel to them. And I can see a little Antiquated when trying to read through.
Still it doesn't take away from the action on screen and the performances are fantastic to watch. Especially in one scene or everybody sitting around a projector looking at one of the actresses performance on their own camera in where she's pretending to be really bad at what she's doing. So you can really see the difference between subpar acting and professional acting simultaneously in the story.
And it's really well paste. I'm always amazed at how engaging some of these silent films can be. They have so much working against them compared to Modern Cinema. And yet they are able to keep my attention better than a lot of new movies.
It just proves that at the end of the day; It's the story and the screen presence that matters most in the film above any sort of technical advancement or even well meaning dialogue.
There's a scene towards the beginning of the movie of a film crew producing a middle eastern themed film.
They have the stereotypical music dress and mannerisms that have been associated with the Middle East for well over a couple hundred years now. And it astounds me just how little has changed in the public eye about this region given that this film is nearly a hundred years old.
It makes me wonder: Do these stereotypes exist out of ignorance or bigotry?
How many people purposely want to refer to Western Asia as a backwards land just because they think they're Odd\Wrong, badmouth a particular region for whatever reason.
And how much of it is just; 'We really don't know anything about this territory, so we're going off the crumbs of info that are known to us'.
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