The Roaring Road.

Review #1263: The Roaring Road.

Cast: 
Wallace Reid (Walter Thomas "Toodles" Waldron), Ann Little (Dorothy Ward, the cub), Theodore Roberts (J. D. Ward, the bear), Guy Oliver (Tom Darby), and Clarence Geldart (Fred Wheeler) Directed by James Cruze.

Review: 
How many times can one pick a century-old film to give spotlight to? The decade saw Hollywood rise in stature for film-making in the United States, with several studios rising to the occasion to make their own films, ranging from shorts to roughly an hour. Who better to cover than a film from Paramount Pictures, one of the oldest film studios still in existence that also happens to be the lone major studio still located in Hollywood. In a silent era where plenty of films were lost to audiences after release forever, one can appreciate the ones that did in fact survive for someone to view (particularly for films exhibited for over 95 years, which make for fresh pickings in the public domain), and I would hope that a viewer picks at least one film from this particular era of film-making to look at once in a while. This is a year in which test screenings were only just beginning to be used to gauge reactions to film, after all. Not every film needs to be loud or expressive to be a true winner, although the reverse can easily be said when it comes to how films were back then, which certainly could be spectacular or ridiculous. In this case, this is an okay movie, filled will silly moments to boot aside from a few interesting directing sequences (done through Frank Urson) that accompany a relic like this. It just doesn't feel like the kind of film meant to endure as heavily as other films of its time, where Broken Blossoms and The Grim Game managed to evoke more emotion and thrills in the same year. Each film certainly looks like they came from 1919, but there is a certain energy in the direction or its star that really drive those two films to inspire curiosity that this does not.

What is this film, you may wonder. Well, it's about a automobile salesman who wants to race and also get the daughter of his boss - even winning the big race in the middle of its 58 minute run-time doesn't convince the dad to let go of his daughter to be married unless they wait five years, because...1919, I suppose. Marion Fairfax helped write the scenario based on short stories done by Byron Morgan (Junkpile Sweepstakes, Undertaker's Handicap, Roaring Road), which turned out to be such a success that it inspired a sequel named Excuse My Dust the following year. Reid does fine, even if one doesn't really see that much of him (the auto scenes with him count, I suppose), but what can one really do with a name like Toodles? In the same year that he did this film, Reid suffered an injury to his scalp while in production for The Valley of the Giants. Treatment to relieve his pain at the time meant addiction to morphine that would torment him for the following three years in which he kept working in films before his death in 1923 at the age of 31. Little is okay, although she doesn't really seem to show that much passion (one would expect that from a film that favors its race action a bit more, really). Roberts (introduced to us after a quick shot of a bear to open the film) is also okay, playing to the strings of the plot with reasonable unreasonableness. In the end, this is a fairly mediocre effort that just can't inspire a shift into second gear despite all the chances to do so. You wouldn't hate what you see on screen by any means, but you also wouldn't really like it all that much either.

Overall, I give it 6 out of 10 stars.