Dorothy Davenport Reid--The Road to Ruin (1934)

This may be the last Dorothy Davenport Reid film I watch for this project, unless I locate another one that’s readily available. Let’s re-cap:

• ·         Red Kimona (1925, “Produced under the personal supervision…”)
• ·         Sucker Money (1933, co-directed with Melville Shyer)
• ·         The Woman Condemned (1934, dir. “Mrs. Wallace Reid”)

Yes, I do wish I’d watched them in chronological order.

“Mrs. Wallace Reid” co-directed 1934’s The Road to Ruin with Melville Shyer with whom she also paired for Sucker Money (1933). The film was produced under the auspices of Willis Kent and debuted in March 1934 only a month before The Woman Condemned, also a Willis Kent production. Like that film, this film does not bear any Code seal of approval.

This is an exploitation film. The Road to Ruin doesn’t suffer from the poorly-motivated action that characterized The Woman Condemned and made it very confusing to follow. It also doesn’t suffer from the hysteria of Reefer Madness, which came out in 1936. This is a conventional story of the naïve new-girl-in-town who gets in with the wrong crowd. Kissing, smoking, dancing and staying out late mix with alcohol, which leads to sex, which leads to illegal abortion that leads to death. Risqué jokes shared by bad parents are also implicated.

Parents who are poor role models or too trusting are at fault. The concrete suggestion about how to fix the problem comes from a social worker, who speaks with Ann (Helen Foster, the naïve girl) and Eve (Nell O’Day, the girl who knows a little too much about the seedy side of life) after they and a bunch of drunken friends have been picked up by the police.  The two girls have been labeled “sex delinquents” by the police and after both girls have been examined by the doctor, Eve has to be treated for a sexually-transmitted disease. When Mrs. Dixon, Ann’s mother, comes to pick her up, the social worker tells her what today’s young people need is knowledge, that is, honest, realistic instruction about sex.

This film does not have a frame of direct address to the audience that would put it squarely in the exploitation genre, nor does it end with a warning for the audience, but warning it is. There are no flashbacks to “where she went wrong” or to scenes of hypocritical parents. The structure is entirely linear and chronological. It struck me though that the film was quite remarkable in two ways.

I was surprised at the very open treatment of sex. This film was far more clear about what was happening than any film from the 1950s that I have seen. I imagine that since the film was presented as a lesson and warning, that may have made its straightforwardness more palatable. But 1934 is the year of tightened Code enforcement, so I am curious about how long this kind of realism lasted. The film is relatively low-key about all of these matters and manages to stay just this side of sensationalism. We are aware that these high schoolers’ road to hell is trodden with many a misstep, but it is also interesting to note how little blame or responsibility they are given for their behavior.

Of the parents we are shown, only Mrs. Dixon comes out clean. Eve’s mother, Mrs. Monroe, is separated from Eve’s father. She has a male friend and she is rarely at home.  When she is at home, she is entertaining guests who drink a lot and tell dirty jokes. When Eve is taken up by the police, it’s not immediately clear where her mother can be found. Ann’s mother, on the other hand, is a nice, conventional lady, who makes a mistake in trusting her daughter too much in a new town where the daughter lacks guidance about who the good and bad companions are in her school. Mr. Dixon, who seems like a concerned but busy and rather remote parent, leaves the house saying he is going to a conference, but gets into a taxi in which there is a companion and directs the cab to a hotel. The hypocrisy of adults is pointed out in other ways.  For instance, on the evening of the police raid, neighbors are watching the young people’s misbehavior, which involves the girls taking off most of their clothes and jumping into a pool, and while the watching woman is simply outraged at the behavior, the man expresses outrage but can’t pull himself away from the sight of so many nearly-naked young women. Adults, not high school kids, are obviously the addressees.

Dorothy Davenport Reid was set on the road to making films like this by the death of her husband Wallace Reid from morphine addiction in 1923 when he was only 31. Her first film along these lines, Human Wreckage, was made shortly after his death.  All prints of that film are assumed lost.

By 1934, though, such films had worn out their welcome and with stronger enforcement of the Code on the way, it is unlikely that these morality plays that verged on—or careened into--sensationalism would thrive. They survived the flappers of the 1920s (indeed, producer Willis Kent had made The Road to Ruin as a silent film in 1928, starring Helen Foster who would have been, at the age of 22, more convincing in her role as a high school girl than she is here, six years later, as Ann), but would not survive the changing tastes of Depression-Era moviegoers.