The Risky Road

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.