The Road to Ruin

The Road to Ruin (1928)

Thrilling! Sensational! It seemed such a beautiful road, such a wonderful road - But it was only the Road to Ruin!

A controversial, low-budget drama about the life of a young teenage girl that goes on the "road to ruin." Sally is a 16-year-old New York City teen who, neglected by her parents, takes up smoking and drinking, engages in affairs with a series of older men, gets arrested by the police during a strip poker game, is sent home only to discover later that she's pregnant, and after getting an illegal abortion, the words "The Wages of Sin is Death" inexpliably appear over her bed in fire.

Date of release
1928-03-23
TMDB
7.3 / 10 (3)
Runtime
58m
Genres
Drama
Director
Norton S. Parker

Casting

Interesting facts

The Road to Ruin is a 1928 American silent black-and-white exploitation film directed by Norton S. Parker and starring Helen Foster. 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.

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. 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".

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