The Road to Ruin

... from First Division Pictures, and written, produced and co-directed (with Melville Shyer) by Mrs. Wallace Reid (Dorothy Davenport). High school student Ann (Helen Foster) falls in with a bad crowd that's into drinking, smoking, and dancing poorly. Her new goofball boyfriend Tommy (Glen Boles) likes booze as much as he likes pawing Ann, so she gets bored and starts seeing shady character Ralph (Paul Page), who leads her into even darker depravity, like skinny-dipping in the backyard pool, strip dice games, and more poor dancing. Also featuring Nell O'Day as Ann's best gal pal (they read naughty books together).

Routine fare for this genre, this was a remake of a 1928 silent of the same name. There's a lengthy nightclub scene in the middle of the film featuring 3 bad singing performances (accompanied by the aforementioned bad dancing) that made me wish that this one was silent, too. Of course, the ultimate culprit for Ann's degeneracy is her parents inattention, since they're too busy heading out to the "Cotton Club". This morality lesson/time capsule is good for some unintentional laughs. It rates higher than what I have given it if you judge it on the so bad it is good scale.

1st watched 2/17/2007 - 4 out of 10(Dir-Mrs. Wallace Reid & Melville Shyer): Interesting yet slow moving movie displaying many taboo subjects for back then including pre-marital sex, smoking and drinking in high school, nude swimming, an abortion, and older men with younger under-aged women and all being done under the radar of the well-meaning parents in the story. The movie is fairly well done as far as not over sensationalizing the situations and portrays it as a young victim kind of walks into trouble unexpectedly with an obvious innocence. This I'm sure is more how things like this happen instead of how it's usually portrayed. The downward path happens fairly slowly for the main character but it quickly comes to it's end on a very negative note after a badly done abortion. This is the best of these exploitation movies from the 30's that I've seen because it's not thrown in your face but instead builds slowly. Despite this, the slow pace doesn't help the movie be a very powerful story and is it's only real drawback.

Pre-Code exploitation flick about a teenage girl (27 year-old Helen Foster) whose life unravels when she gets involved with the wrong crowd. Booze, drugs, sex, unwanted pregnancy, and abortion are some of the highlights. Provocative for its time no doubt, today it's little more than a curiosity piece worth some giggles. Probably the most titilating scene is a dice game with women stripping to their undies. Maybe of interest to those who want to see what passed for youth culture in the early '30s. Or at least the Hollywood version of it. Remake of an earlier silent that also starred Foster.

Road to Ruin, The (1934)

** (out of 4)

A good girl that never even been kissed falls in with the wrong crowd and soon she's staying out past eight, smoking drinking and eventually..........building suspense .....having sex. Soon she starts seeing a local thug who gets her pregnant and then forces her to have an abortion. Will she straighten up in time? **suspense builds even more** Here's another forgotten exploitation film that isn't too bad but even its short 62-minute running time seems a tad bit long. The over-dramatic ending gets a few laughs but for the most part the film plays rather straight, which means we don't get any major laughs like other films from its genre.

This is a cautionary tale aimed at parents. Similar to "Reefer Madness", the film seeks to warn society against the perils of bad parenting. Ann Dixon (Helen Foster) is the main character, a teen who is a model of proper behavior. As her relationship with friend Eve Monroe (Nell O'Day) develops, she is influenced by Eve's behaviors, which are riskier and more permissive.

The plot is almost predictable. A puff on a cigarette leads to an alcoholic drink, which leads to a ride in a fast car, and before you know it...pregnancy! Well, there are some other dots to connect along the way, but it's a fairly linear progression. And who is to blame? The parents.

There are other factors, of course, like bad associations and peer pressure, but the lack of parental supervision and bad parental modeling are the main culprits.

And there are boys and men who pressure the girls into behaviors that push the boundaries of propriety, and there are others who have no regard for the welfare of young women.

The film suffers from simplicity of plot, one-dimensional characters, and a predictable preachiness. It is not meant to be entertaining, per se; there is a definite element of exploitation, since the newly instituted Hayes Code can be circumvented somewhat by claiming to be educational. The risqué scenes would be censored in most other films.