The Road to Ruin (1928)

Originally posted to Facebook on 10/7/2018

The Road to Ruin was our eleventh film from 1928. This film stars Helen Foster as a high-schooler who makes the mistake of smoking cigarettes and seeing boys, which, as the title suggests, inevitably leads to cataclysmic disaster -- and in rather short order too, as this film is only sixty minutes long. Despite the fact that it has a respectable rating on IMDB, and was apparently a box-office hit, this is perhaps the worst feature film that we've seen as part of this project. It reminded me of sub-par after-school specials, warning against various arguably risky behaviors, but in a risibly alarmist and hysterical tone -- and transparently taking perverse pleasure at showing the consequences. We have seen many films with misguided or wrongheaded moralistic authorial viewpoints -- most of the Griffith films we've seen, for instance -- but never with the kind of clunky writing and lack of dramatic structure on display in this film. It has rather poor production values as well, though some of that may have been the fault of the print, which was not in terribly good shape.

One of the reasons that I'd originally decided to add this film to the project was that IMDB had listed it as being directed by Dorothy Davenport, the widow of Wallace Reid (whom we'd seen in Carmen and Hawthorne of the U.S.A.) However it appears that she directed the sound remake in 1934 (also starring Helen Foster), while this film was directed by Norton S. Parker. This led to my first successful IMDB correction, so I suppose the viewing wasn't a total loss.

Next week we'll watch The Mysterious Lady, our twelfth film from from 1928, and the second starring Greta Garbo. The list, as always, is here: https://bit.ly/2lZtfmT