ROADWith a higher share of female directors than its rivals, Universal Film Manufacturing Company stands as an exception within the American film industry of the 1910s; from 1912 until 1919, at least 170 of the company’s films were directed by eleven female filmmakers. One of these women, who worked for Universal before the company changed its production policy in 1920 to employ only male directors, was Ida May Park. She 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.

Magnus Rosborn