The Road to Ruin (1928 film)
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. Plot
Cast
MusicThe sound version featured a theme song entitled “The Road to Ruin” by Lottie Wells and Maurice Wells. ProductionThe 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
External linksWikimedia Commons has media related to The Road to Ruin (1928).
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