The Road to Ruin (1928 film)

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The Road to Ruin
The Road to Ruin 1928 poster.jpg
Lantern slide
Directed by Norton S. Parker
Written by Willis Kent
Produced byWillis Kent
Starring Helen Foster
Cinematography Henry Cronjager
Edited by Edith Wakeling
Distributed byTrue-Life Photoplays
Release date
  • March 23, 1928 (1928-03-23)
Running time
60 minutes
CountryUnited States
Language Silent (English intertitles)
Box office$2,500,000 [1]
The Road to Ruin (1928) by Norton S. Parker

The Road to Ruin is a 1928 American silent black-and-white exploitation film directed by Norton S. Parker and starring Helen Foster. [2] Due to its popularity, a sound version of the film was released late in 1928. While the sound version of the film has no audible dialog, it featured a synchronized musical score with sound effects using both the sound-on-disc and sound-on-film process. The film is about a teenage girl, Sally Canfield, whose life is led astray by sex, smoking, and drinking, and ruined by an abortion. The film was remade as a talkie in 1934.

Contents

Plot

Cast

Music

The sound version featured a theme song entitled "The Road to Ruin" by Lottie Wells and Maurice Wells.

Production

The Road to Ruin was made on a budget of either $15,000 or $25,000, making it one of the least expensive films made that year. [3] Director Norton S. Parker later told his wife that lead actress Helen Foster was much like her character in that she was relatively naive; during the filming of the strip poker scenes, Parker kept a bottle of hard alcohol to offer Foster "liquid courage". The film was shot by Henry Cronjager using a hand-cranked camera typical of the era, but at faster-than-normal crank speed; this helped fill up each reel and getting the final film to feature length, but had the effect of making all the action in the film move slower. [4]

References

  1. ↑ Box Office Information for The Road to Ruin
  2. ↑ Progressive Silent Film List: The Road to Ruin at silentera.com
  3. ↑ "Star Gazing Along Movie Way". The Belleville News-Democrat . Vol. 73 No. 275, 16 November 1928, p. 7. Accessed 31 March 2022.
  4. ↑ Brownlow, Kevin. Behind the Mask of Innocence: Sex, Violence, Prejudice, Crime: Films of Social Conscience in the Silent Era. Berkeley & Los Angeles: University of California Press. p. 176. ISBN   978-1-118-74365-2


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