THE ROAD TO RUIN

US, 1934, 62 minutes, Black-and-white.
Helen Foster, Nell O' Dea, Glenn Bowles, Robert Quirk, Paul Paige.
Directed by Dorothy Davenport (Mrs Wallace Reid), Melville Shyer.

The main reason for seeing The Road to Ruin is for its comparative shock value. It was a remake of a 1928 film, also starring Helen Foster and also directed by Mrs Wallace Reid. It was released in the year that the 1930 Motion Picture Code came into force. It could be said, given its subject and treatment, just in time! It is certainly a Pre-Code? kind of film.

One of the questions about it is how much is it a reflection of morals and mores of the early 1930s and how much is it a moralising warning against excess. The answer seems to be that it is both.

It starts in a very lively way with students coming out of school, even a contemporary look and feel. And, many of them are wild, drinking, smoking, parties, and some permissive sex. The parent generation tends to be very strict, even censorious.

The focus is on two girls, friends, one very prim and destined for an enormous fall, the other a bit more permissive and destined to survive. Friends give Ann, the prim and proper girl (Helen Foster) a lift home, leading to her going out, liking a young man who is over-fond of drinking, a scene of implicit sexual activity and the repercussions. However, she is also attracted to a suave older man (whom the audience has seen planning to seduce her). She succumbs, drinks, smokes, is attracted to him sexually. Eventually, she is pregnant. And, rather shockingly, given the history of abortion on screen in the succeeding decades, she goes to a shady doctor with the man pacing outside, the bed is seen – but the abortion goes wrong, she becomes ill and, eventually, dies. The initial young man comes to visit her strict parents wanting to do something for her.

There is a rather long scene of a very wild party with people jumping into a pool, raucously loud, censorious neighbours sending for the police, everyone rounded up and a woman official, played by Mrs Wallace Reid herself, talking to the girls and to Ann’s mother who blames herself.

As a film, not particularly good – but something of a reminder eye-opener to American society and the felt need to create the Motion Picture Code – while also moralising about the lack of morals.