The Risky Road

The Risky Road — Plot

Ida May Park started in the film business as a scriptwriter, but in 1917 Universal announced that Park would direct films with actress and producer Dorothy Phillips for the company’s Bluebird brand. Park’s films often had a strong female perspective and The Risky Road is no exception. The story of a country girl who comes to the city to work, but falls for a rich man and undeservedly gets a bad reputation, the film was marketed as “the drama every woman should see”. The surviving fragment, showing the despair of Phillips’s character, is a real cinematic gem that leaves one yearning for more material of the film to be discovered. In 2008, a tinted nitrate fragment, with Swedish intertitles at the opening of the second reel, was deposited at the Archival Film Collections of the Svenska Filminstitutet. From the fragment, a 35mm B&W duplicate negative was made, from which this print was struck using the tinting of the nitrate as color reference.

• Release date
• April 8, 1918
• Runtime
• 50 min
• Genres
• Drama
• Director
• Ida May Park

The Risky Road — Cast

Dorothy Phillips Marjorie Helmer William Stowell Melville Kingston Juanita Hansen Lottie Bangor Sally Starr Myrtle Claire Du Brey Mrs. Kingston George Chesebro Robert Grant Joseph W. Girard Van Belt

E

Edward Cecil Miles Kingston