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.

To cure their flirtatious husbands of consorting with flappers, three wives-- Susan Martin, Ethel Drake, and Kitty Ladd-- arrange with three college boys-- Henry Winton, Oscar, and Joe Valley-- to flirt with them at a house party. Joe Valley, who poses as a hot-blooded Spaniard, is vamped by Ginsberg in female attire, and Oscar, a bashful Swede, uses caveman methods when aroused. During a rehearsal of the party, the three husbands arrive, followed by their flapper friends, leading to comic complications.

Dolly Havens, a small-town girl with big-town ambitions that are larger than her talents, hooks up with Johnny Storm, a vaudeville performer, whose talents make the act a success. Dolly, thinking she is the reason, meets a handsome leading man and joins up with him but, before long, he discovers 'she ain't a trouper' and she is soon performing with 4th-class acts in Tank Town America.

The story of twin sisters, one raised in Russia, the other in America, and how their lives diverge and re-entangle.