The Risky Road
The Risky Road
NR | 08 April 1918 (USA)
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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.

Reviews
Merolliv

I really wanted to like this movie. I feel terribly cynical trashing it, and that's why I'm giving it a middling 5. Actually, I'm giving it a 5 because there were some superb performances.

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Orla Zuniga

It is interesting even when nothing much happens, which is for most of its 3-hour running time. Read full review

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Myron Clemons

A film of deceptively outspoken contemporary relevance, this is cinema at its most alert, alarming and alive.

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Jemima

It's a movie as timely as it is provocative and amazingly, for much of its running time, it is weirdly funny.

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