The Road to Ruin
About The Road to Ruin
With little attention from her parents, Sally Canfield follows her friend Eve into drinking, smoking, and affairs with older men. Police raid a strip-poker game and send her home. Weeks later she finds she is pregnant, submits to an illegal abortion, and dies of shock the next night after she is paired, in a brothel, with her own father.
Cast & crew
More about The Road to Ruin
Willis Kent wrote and produced it. Norton S. Parker directed. True-Life Photoplays distributed it, with a San Francisco opening at the Imperial Theatre on March 23, 1928. Published reports put the cost at $15,000 in one account and $25,000 in another. A late-1928 edition added a synchronized score and effects, on disc and on film, and still had no spoken dialogue.
Themes
Background
State and city boards were still cutting pictures scene by scene in 1928. A film that showed an abortion and then killed the girl for it was built to draw both the vice crowd and the censors.
Making
The San Francisco Examiner review the morning after the Imperial opening praised Foster and treated the film as a sincere handling of a sensational plot.
Reviews
The San Francisco Examiner, reviewing the March 23, 1928 Imperial Theatre opening, praised Helen Foster and the film's treatment of the material.
Look
Henry Cronjager shot the picture, including the barn dance and the strip-poker raid.
Music
The silent release used intertitles only. The late-1928 synchronized version added a score and effects, with the theme song "The Road to Ruin" by Lottie Wells and Maurice Wells, and no spoken dialogue.
Preservation
A print circulates for free viewing. The Internet Archive holds a copy.
Notes
- Helen Foster plays Sally Canfield, Grant Withers plays Don Hughes, Florence Turner and Charles Miller play her parents, Virginia Roye plays Eve Terrell, and Thomas Carr plays her brother Jimmy.
- Henry Cronjager photographed it. Edith Wakeling edited it.
- Parker later told his wife that Foster was nervous in the strip-poker scenes and that he kept a bottle of liquor on the set to offer her.
- A Variety item of August 4, 1928, said the story came from the Los Angeles Juvenile Court.
- Censorship boards objected to the sex, prostitution, and abortion material.
- The synchronized release used a theme song, "The Road to Ruin," by Lottie Wells and Maurice Wells.
- Kent and Foster remade the story as a talkie in 1934, with Foster again as Sally.
Scenes
- Police walk in on the strip-poker game and send Sally home.
- Sally dies of shock after the brothel pairs her with her father.
Influenced
- The Road to Ruin (1934)
Also available
- Internet Archive (the-road-to-ruin_1928)