This is a sound remake by Mrs Wallace Reid (who appears uncredited near the end in her accustomed role seated at a desk wearing a tie and a concerned expression as the voice of caring, socially responsible authority) of an earlier, apparently much racier, silent film she had made also starring Helen Foster. The 1928 version, according to Variety's reviewer 'Chic' "was crude and hotly sexed", but had now been "denatured and with the action greatly restrained...toned down to the point of mildness. The director apparently worked with one eye on the censors and the other on the box office, with astigmatism resulting."
Considering that the film is called 'The Road to Ruin', the film certainly spends an inordinate amount of its running time on the road - devoting an awful lot of footage, for example, to a wild pre-Code party which ends with the participants joining in a type of strip poker before all ending up in a swimming pool - before at long last arriving rather abruptly at its final tragic destination. There's also the little matter of Miss Foster's age. She still brings a sweet innocence to her role, but in the earlier version she was already 21 years old; and was by now 27, yet still playing a schoolgirl.
As is usual in such films, one wonders why the slimeball who plies Ann with booze and drugs and then pressures her into an abortion didn't just pick on a more robust girl with looser morals in the first place - of whom there seems no shortage in the film - rather than corrupting this delicate young flower. Nell O'Day as Ann's worldly blonde schoolfriend Eve Monroe, for example (resembling a prettier version of the young Bette Davis), despite obviously already having been round the block a few times as a 'sex delinquent' comes out of the film relatively unscathed; thus raising the possibility that if Ann had gone to her for advice about birth control the final tragedy might have been averted. (Eve obviously gets her glamorous, worldly-wise blonde good looks from Mommy, by the way, as played by an unbilled Mae Busch).
