Bluebird Photoplays

Gabrielle Picard (Elda Hall) and Pierre Dupont (Rupert Julian) are lovers in a small French village in the early 1870s; Gabrielle's brother Anatole (Kingsley Benedict) is Pierre's best friend. The two young men are called to service by their country and go to Algiers. Anatole becomes the bugler and one day when he is commanded to sound the retreat, he sounds for the troops to charge instead. Anatole becomes a hero because of his action, but when the two men make their victorious return home, they find the Picard home ransacked and Gabrielle gone.

Inheriting his father's alcoholism, Lawyer Tom Gallatin goes into the woods to rehabilitate himself. Once there, he loses his way and then meets Jane Loring, who is also lost. They are attracted to each other, but when Jane offers him a drink from a flask, Tom takes more than just a few sips, and then tries to rape her.

Rosie Sanguinetti's parents arrange her marriage, against her will, to Antonio Mosconi, "Tony the Barber." At the wedding ceremony in her Little Italy, New York neighborhood, Rosie flees to the settlement house where she meets Jerry Van Tyne, a wealthy young man who agrees, in a drunken state, to marry her. The next day Jerry realizes the consequences of the situation.

A woman who is presumed dead takes revenge on her unfaithful husband.

Chorus girl Rosa Carillo (Carmel Myers) finds herself in dire straits when the troupe she works with is disbanded and her last fifty dollars is stolen. Artist Billy Leeds (Earl Rodney) offers to take care of her, but she's leery of his proposition. Instead she finds work with an Italian grocer, Tony Bonchi (Edwin August). One of the other ex-members of the troupe has Tony arrested on a trumped up charge. Rosa returns to Billy and offers herself to him if only he'll get Tony out of jail.

En route to Australia, beautiful authoress Alice Gordon (Louise Lovely) is shipwrecked on a desert island in the company of wealthy book publisher John Meeson. Sensing that his days are numbered, and lacking pencil and paper, Meeson tattoos his last will and testament on Alice's lovely back.

An Indian scholar seeks an American colleague who is working on a powerful explosive, trying to get to his formula by taking advantage of his drinking problem.

Monty Gray returns to the US after spending 10 years building railroads in China. As he enters a hotel he runs into an old friend from college whom he hasn't seen in years, and they begin catching up on old times. Monty notices a picture of a young woman that his friend is carrying and, bowled over by her beauty, he instantly falls for her.

A girl who loves dancing more than anything must prove her identity in order to keep her inheritance.

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

Wracked with illness and discarded by a wealthy and unscrupulous aristocrat, Yvonne Lamour seeks out her former sweetheart Anatole in order to beg him to care for her infant daughter Yvonne. She finds him in a monastery, now Pere Anatole, having joined to ease the pain of her leaving him. Soon after, Yvonne dies and little Yvonne grows to adulthood and falls in love with Jean Duval, a young violinist. When the war devastates the land, Anatole flees to America, taking Jean and Yvonne with him. There, beset by poverty, Jean endeavors to earn a living by playing the violin, but fails. In desperation, he pawns his violin to buy food and falls victim to the charms of Sonia Maroff, a wealthy woman whose fancy he has captured.

Madge Garvey (Dorothy Phillips) works in a shoe factory. Her father Joe (Richard de la Reno) is a drunk who beats his wife (Alice May Youss), and her sister Helen (Belle Bennett) has repeated the pattern by marrying Dan Mallory (Edward Brady). The new foreman, John Blake (William Stowell), fires Mallory. Mallory attacks him, but because of his alcohol abuse, his heart gives out and he dies. Blake asks Joe for Madge's hand, and he accepts for her. Madge longs for something better, when Cora, a former stenographer from the company (Golda Madden), writes her from the big city.

In the early eighteenth century, pirate captain Jean Lafitte fights a rival pirate and wins a treasure and a beautiful female captive. Although the girl offers herself to Lafitte to save her English lover, Lafitte makes him walk the plank. The girl then places a curse on Lafitte and his descendants, preventing them from ever knowing the true love of woman. Two hundred years later, in the West Antilles, painter Paul Winthrop poses Joe, a pearl diver, as a pirate. Upon seeing the completed painting, each envisions the earlier situation. Later, Joe finds the buried treasure and sails to New York, where he learns that the portrait has also attracted wealthy Lily Demorest and her suitor, Robert Spurr, a "financial pirate."

Paul Revere Forbes, an descendant of Paul Revere, is a teller at Cyrus Peabody's bank. He learns that Cyrus and his son, Ernest, have speculated with $35,000 of the bank's money, and the entire sum has been lost.

The daughter of an American diplomat is forced to spy for Mexican revolutionaries.

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.

A secret service agent disguises himself as a sailor.

Three outlaws fleeing a posse through the desert come upon a dying woman and her baby in a wagon. Before she passes away, she makes the men promise to take care of her baby and get it safely through the desert.

An actress falls in love with a shepherd, to the dismay of a wealthy suitor. One reel survives at the National Archives Of Canada and the Library of Congress.