IF THE SHOE FITS... "Did you ever get the feeling that the world was a tuxedo and you were a pair of brown shoes?".

• Author: Gehring, Wes D.
• Position: REEL WORLD

AS A FILM professor, I teach my students to scrutinize the screen closely to better "read" a movie. For example, is there a snippet of another film within the film. These are rarely accidents. To illustrate, there is the briefest cinema informational in-joke early from Martin McDonagh's Academy Award-winning dark comedy, "In Bruges" (2008). A British hit man (Brendan Gleeson) is watching the opening of Orson Welles' 'Touch of Evil" (1958). If one ever wondered about the profession's possible viewing habits--Welles' beginning depicts a hit man planting a car bomb.

However, playful or pivotal, plot points need not be as brief as a film fragment, or a burning Rosebud finale. Sometimes key miseen-scene (objects in the film frame) can be almost ever present, something as simple as shoes. Indeed, pop culture claims nothing defines one more than foot apparel.

Alfred Hitchcock films frequently play upon this perspective, such as the corpse's Technicolor bright shiny new shoes that open "The Trouble with Harry" (1955). Then there is the tide character's even more dazzling two-tone blue and red socks. Said corpse will be buried and dug up throughout the movie.

However, Hitchcock's piece de resistance, with regard to shoes, starts the director's "Strangers on a Train" (1951). This is the picture in which man-child mama's boy Bruno (Robert Walker) proposes a crisscross exchange of random (fail-safe) murders to Farley Granger's professional tennis-playing Guy. The duo meet murder plot point cute. Walker's psychopathic encounters Granger's famous athlete on a train. However, viewers first follow a comic crisscross path of just their footwear in boarding.

Bruno's oxfords are expensive but gaudy two-tone gunboats, while the modest Guy wears a nondescript pair, as lackluster as he is, despite being a star tennis player. Both end up in the train's club car; their shoes accidentally touch, and Bruno starts a conversation that entertainingly leads to his crisscross pitch. He proposes to kill Guy's adulterous, money-hungry estranged wife, if the straight-arrow athlete murders the charismatic villain's hated father. It is as brassy basic as Bruno's eyesore shoes or garish monogrammed tie.

Given this character-defining piece of apparel, it should come as no surprise that shoes often are the focus of the traditional arts, delineating everything from class or innocent romanticism. Indeed, both are combined in the Cinderella folktale, which also has been entitled "The Little Glass Slipper." The young girl is as transparently pure and victim-in-waiting fragile as the see-through slippers.

Moreover, one of the Western world's most-identifiable painters, Vincent van Gogh, was obsessed with the...