So fallen die Lose des Lebens

A lottery win of $5,000 forever changes the lives of a miner turned dentist and his wife.

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.

An inventor, David Hammond is the son of a ship's captain. He leaves his sweetheart, Lisbeth Bixler, and goes to the city to promote his invention. Lisbeth's father, an unsuccessful artist, deserts his family, secretly intending to commit suicide.

Pastor Talnoх furiously urges the flock to fight temptations, but he himself becomes a victim of temptation. In his house appears Satan, pushing the hero to theft and spiritual fall.

A young woman, a prisoner who was dressed to steal by her lover, is in jail. She would like to see her sweetheart. One night she succeeds in persuading the doctor of the prison who also is a woman, to be released. She finds the man, a waiter in an elegant hotel, behaving as a cynical Don Juan, he was preparing to rob the safe of the hotel and go away with his new lover, a dancer. This dancer suffers a fatal accident.

Charles Chauvel's first feature tells the story of a country girl, Dell Ferris (the Moth of Moonbi), drawn to the bright lights of the big city where her inheritance is soon frittered away with high society revelling. A wiser Dell returns to Moonbi Station where she is beset by the cattle rustler Jack Bronson, but finally finds peace and happiness with the faithful head stockman, Tom. Only part of the film survives to this day.

A nobleman seeks to rescue his bride, who has been kidnapped by his former lover and a bandit.

A love triangle set against the turn-of-the-century gold rush.

A husband orders his wife to keep their marriage a secret, in order to better continue his affair with a married woman.

The story of a poor young woman, separated by prejudice from her husband and baby, is interwoven with tales of intolerance from throughout history.