Katherine Leiser Robbins

Leona Williard works in a millinery shop in a small town while dreaming of going to New York and marrying a wealthy man. An inheritance of five thousand dollars turns her dream into a reality, and Leona goes to the city where she meets Mrs. Geraldine De Forest, an old friend of her mother's who introduces Leona to a wealthy widower named Frazer Boynton. Boynton proposes to the girl, but Leona refuses because she is in love with Jasper Halroyd. Mrs. De Forest, who is secretly in love with Jasper, lies to Leona that he is her lover. Horrified, Leona accepts Boynton's proposal, but later, after Jasper saves Leona from drowning, she realizes that she still loves him.

At a party thrown by millionaire Max Goldberg, Charles Howard, an aristocratic young artist, succumbs to the charms of chorus girl Lita O'Farrell, Goldberg's erstwhile girl friend. After a whirlwind courtship, the two marry and then their incompatibilities begin to surface.

Elena Evans is raised by her puritanical Aunt Elvira, who believes that because of Elena's mother, Elena possesses "the scarlet strain."

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.