| The Road to Ruin | |
| Director: | Norton S. Parker |
| Producer: | Willis Kent |
| Starring: | Helen Foster |
| Cinematography: | Henry Cronjager |
| Editing: | Edith Wakeling |
| Distributor: | True-Life Photoplays |
| Runtime: | 60 min. |
| Country: | United States |
| Language: | Silent (English intertitles) |
| Gross: | $2,500,000[1] |
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.
The sound version featured a theme song entitled “The Road to Ruin” by Lottie Wells and Maurice Wells.
The Road to Ruin was made on a budget of either $15,000 or $25,000, making it one of the cheapest 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]