The Lead Shoes is a 1949 short film (16 minutes) directed by Sidney Peterson and made by Peterson's students at the San Francisco Art Institute.
It is a deeply strange film with no clear story. A woman wearing nothing but a slip stands at her window, in obvious distress. She jumps out the window (it isn't very high up) and runs to the beach, where she sees something buried in sand. She digs in the sand and finds a man in a diving suit with lead shoes. She then drags the man back to her apartment, dumps his body out of the suit, and embraces the suit. While she's getting the man to the window she meets another man, with blood dripping from his hands. The man eats a loaf of bread, which changes repeatedly to a bone and back. The bone seems to bleed. The two men are probably her sons, and the one with bloody hands seems to have killed the other one. And oh yeah, there's a little girl playing hopscotch.
Yep, it's Le Film Artistique.
Tropes:
- All There in the Manual: Or rather, all there in the opening credits. The credits attribute the soundtrack to "The Three Edwards and a Raven". This is a scrambled reference to two traditional English ballads, "The Three Ravens" and "Edward". In the ballad "The Three Ravens", three ravens debate whether or not to eat the corpse of a knight killed in battle, until his mistress carries him away. "Edward" is a different ballad in which a mother confronts her son, who has bloodstained hands. In the ballad, the son admits to having killed his brother. This is really all the evidence there is in the movie to support the notion that the two men are the woman's sons.
- Mind Screw: WTF? Why did the man turn into hamsters?
- Rewind Gag: Much of the action of the film is shown backwards, to further the disorienting effect. This is most obvious when the little girl's chalk line disappears, but much of the rest of the action, like the woman putting on her shoes or dragging the diver, is obviously being played backwards.
- Stylistic Suck: The entire film was shot with distorting anamorphic lenses that leave the outside parts of the image blurred and make it hard to judge relative depth. And then there's the music, a bunch of jazz-style noodling with some tuneless "singing" and chatter.
- Swarm of Rats: Well, hamsters. But at one point the woman opens the man's diving helmet faceplate, and the man is gone. Instead a bunch of hamsters come out.
- Time-Shifted Actor: The girl playing hopscotch may be the same person as the older woman. It's only a guess, but they're both wearing the same kind of thin cotton shift.
