The Risky Road (1918)
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.
Director: Ida May Park
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Dorothy Phillips as Marjorie Helmer |
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William Stowell as Melville Kingston |
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Juanita Hansen as Lottie Bangor |
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Sally Starr as Myrtle |
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Claire Du Brey as Mrs. Kingston |
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George Chesebro as Robert Grant |
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Joseph W. Girard as Van Belt |
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Edward Cecil as Miles Kingston |
| Directing | Ida May Park | Director |
| Writing | Ida May Park | Writer |
| Writing | Katherine Leiser Robbins | Story |
