The Road to Ruin

(1934)
Directed by Melville Shyer, Mrs. Wallace Reid (Dorothy Davenport)
Written by Mrs. Wallace Reid (Dorothy Davenport)
Starring Helen Foster, Neil Monroe, Glen Boles, Virginia True Boardman, Richard Tucker
IMDB Entry

Dorothy Davenport was a woman with a mission. She was an actress and married Wallace Reid, who was became a major silent film star in the last teens. Sadly, Reid developed an addiction to morphine after an injury and died in 1923, shocking Hollywood* Davenport, who had dropped out of acting to raise her children, started directing and producing message films, beginning with one on morphine addiction and billed herself as "Mrs. Wallace Reid" to get authenticity. One of these was The Road to Ruin.**

Ann Dixon (Helen Foster) is a high school girl who starts to hang out with her friend Eve Monroe (Nell O'Day). Evel is wild, hanging out with boys, smoking cigarettes, and drinking and Ann gets drawn into it all. She starts to date Tommy (Glen Boles) and, one night when they go to a lake to party, she loses her virginity to him.*** Ann becomes further mixed up with the bad eggs, and one night, Ralph Bennett (Paul Page), a man in his twenties, seduces her away from Tommy. There is another wild party, where the women are enticed to play a form of strip dice and swim in a pool. The cops arrive. Taken to the hospital, they discover that Eve has syphilis and Ann is pregnant. Ann goes to an abortionist,**** but the surgery is botched and she dies.

One odd thing is the three musical numbers in the movie. Very strange, given the downbeat tone of the film, but in 1934, musicals were expected.

The move is not crazily sensationalist like Reefer Madness and the code makes it oblique and tame, but it's an interesting document of how the keepers of morality saw young women at the time.

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*News of the addiction was kept under wraps.

**There are three versions of it -- a silent one in 1928, a reissue with dialog in 1929, and a full sound version in 1934. I'll be talking about the latter.

***I think. Since the film was post-code, and Davenport wanted it to be seen by conservative audiences, it's a bit vague on exactly what went on. But Ann is clearly regretful and Tommy tries to console her.

****They dance around what's going on, and never mention the word.