PRESERVED FILMS

The Roaring Road (1919)
Distribution Company: Paramount Corp. Production Company: Famous Players-Lasky Corp. Producer: Jesse Lasky. Director: James Cruze. Assistant Director: James Barranger. Art Director: Wilfred Buckland. Cinematographer: Frank Urson. Story: Byron Morgan. Scenario: Marion Fairfax. Cast: Wallace Reid (“Toodles” Walden), Theodore Roberts (J.D. Ward, “the Bear”), Ann Little (Dorothy Ward, “The Cub”), Guy Oliver (Tom Darby), Clarence Gelbart (Fred Wheeler). Transfer Note: Scanned from a 35mm preservation print by UCLA Film & Television Archive. New Music: Michael Mortilla. Running Time: 56 minutes.

The Roaring Road won a box office grand prix by partnering two of America’s loves in one movie: Wallace Reid and the automobile. The latter romance was in a stage of exponential growth. Between 1910 and 1919—the year of The Roaring Road’s release—the number of motor vehicles in use soared from 468,000 to 7.5 million. Gross motor vehicle revenue in the US went from 12.4 million in 1914 to 64 million in 1919. By the end of the 1920s there were 23 million registered drivers, triple the amount in 1920. Henry Ford’s implementation of the assembly line in 1913 had put the automobile within reach of middle- and working-class Americans; having bought an everyday car, they could fantasize about the ones onscreen. Henry Ford, after watching Wallace Reid triumph in a Ford-like car in Across the Continent (1923), one of the many follow-ups to Roaring Road, remarked that he could send his salesmen down the aisle of the movie theater with order blanks.

The Roaring Road was based on three short stories by Byron Morgan, published in 1918 by The Saturday Evening Post, but inspired by real automotive events. The film’s Santa Monica road race was based on the real one, held annually from 1909 through 1919 (aside from a wartime hiatus in 1917-18) and set up by the Los Angeles Automobile Dealers Association to stoke interest in car buying. The winner of the 1919 race completed 34 laps on the 8.4 mile track at an average speed of 81 miles per hour. If the Paramount pressbook for Roaring Road is to be believed, the onscreen Santa Monica race was filmed on the same track, with Wallace Reid (less believably) driving his own car at one hundred and ten miles per hour.

The film’s car versus train race from Los Angeles to San Francisco was also inspired by the real thing. On June 4, 1915, William Bramlette and T.J. Beaudet raced the Lark, the Southern Pacific’s fastest train, from Los Angeles to San Francisco in a Cadillac Eight (eight-cylinder), setting a record of 12 hours and 10 minutes. Taking a route through Bakersfield, Fresno, and Livermore, they beat the train by one hour and 35 minutes. On May 18, 1916, T. J. Beaudet broke his own record by taking a Cadillac Conqueror from Los Angeles to San Francisco in 9 hours and 37 minutes, averaging 48.4 miles per hour across 463 miles. Cadillac’s state distributor had to be content with this record, since in 1917 California passed a law barring races on public roads. In The Roaring Road Wallace Reid drives a “Darco” stock car (at the time stock car denoted a production-model car) from LA to SF in 13 hours, to head off a California law banning public road racing. Curiously, the film is set in 1913 (as seen on the notarization of the speed record), perhaps to avoid too close comparisons to real events. Today a motorist can, in the unlikely event of light traffic, drive from Los Angeles to San Francisco within five-and-a-half to six hours.

The movie man behind the wheel, Wallace Reid, loved cars as much as the audiences who made The Roaring Road a hit. Before entering movies he’d served as Assistant Editor of Motor Magazine, and at the height of his stardom owned a Marmon Speedster, a Stutz roadster with a horn that played “Yankee Doodle Dandy,” and a McFarlan Sport Roadster, the most expensive car in the US, purchased for the astronomical sum of $5,000. “I love to speed,” he admitted. “If I always drove myself I’d probably spend half my money on fines for breaking the road laws.” He'd probably have spent time in prison too. While speeding down the Pacific Coast Highway in 1915 he ran into a small car, killing its driver and injuring the dead man’s family along with his own passenger, producer Thomas Ince. Reid was charged with manslaughter but cleared by a grand jury, thanks perhaps to his studio connections. Neither time nor mishap allayed Reid’s thirst for speed. In 1922, in possession of a racing license and the world’s fastest car, the Duesenberg Straight 8, he plotted to enter the Indianapolis 500 behind Paramount’s back. He withdrew only after the studio threatened to void his contract.

That daredevil streak set Reid from the stalwart “All-American” cinematic leading men that had preceded him. He also had an insouciant, easy-going charm made him adept at light comedy. Even more importantly, he possessed one of the coveted attributes of a major movie star: an equal appeal to men and women. By 1918 multiple polls ranked Reid among the six top movie stars, and in a 1923 poll of 37,000 high schoolers, conducted in 76 cities nationwide, Reid came in second among male and female students. He was the golden boy of Hollywood, “the man who has everything” as one magazine put it.

Reid had entered the industry in 1910 and worked his way up as an assistant cameraman, scenarist, and director of two-reelers at Universal before becoming an eight-time leading man for Cecil B. DeMille. Eight was also the number of films Reid averaged a year between 1915 and 1922. Despite stardom, he preferred his time behind the camera; “I never wanted to be a moving picture actor,” he confessed. “I wanted to be a director. Just because I'm young and a blonde though, I suppose I'll have to be one.” Though denied the chance to resume directing, he helped actor James Cruze enter the field by badgering producer Jesse Lasky to give his frequent co-star a chance. Cruze debuted with Too Many Millions (1918), which was also the first of 13 films in which he directed Wallace Reid. In 1919 alone, Reid and Cruze made eight films; Roaring Road was the third. A few years later Cruze entered the ranks of major Hollywood directors with his western epic The Covered Wagon (1923).

Another frequent collaborator of Reid’s made his presence unforgettably known on The Roaring Road— Theodore Roberts, playing J.D. Ward “the Bear,” president of the Darco Motor Company. Critics unanimously singled Roberts out for having “walked away with the show.” As Motion Picture Magazine observed, “This picture is supposed to star Wallace Reid, but according to the number of close-ups of Theordore Roberts smoking a cigar, I should say it was starring a new brand of tobacco.” One of Paramount’s most reliable character actors, Roberts appeared with Reid in 14 films, and like him was a favorite of DeMille’s. Able to simultaneously roll his eyes and cigar in scene-stealing arabesques, Roberts excelled at playing testy patriarchs, as in Miss Lulu Bett (1921). The real character-based interest in The Roaring Road is not between Reid and his passive love interest but in the contest of will and manipulation between Reid’s character, “Toodles” Walden, and Roberts “The Bear,” his boss and prospective father-in-law. The film gets good mileage out of the clashes between the animated, hot-tempered Roberts and the easy-going Reid, who is slow to anger but eventually driven to reckless acts by the Bear’s prodding.

The Roaring Road's auto races and dramatic head-butting might seem overly masculine, but the film was scripted by a woman. Marion Fairfax, active in the industry from 1915 to 1926, was one of its most respected screenwriters, working repeatedly with William C. de Mille, Marshall Neilan, Corinne Griffith, and Colleen Moore. For adapting Byron Morgan’s short stories into The Roaring Road she was paid $1,136 from a $28,833 budget. Fairfax was versatile in many genres and went on to script and direct the editing of The Lost World (1925), based on Conan Doyle’s dinosaur adventure. She also formed her own production company to direct The Lying Truth (1921), a tale of small-town life involving cocaine addiction and a lynch mob.

Aside from acclaiming Theodore Roberts, reviewers of The Roaring Road were united in praising the climactic race between car and train. “It is exciting, as the involuntary exclamations and applause of the spectators yesterday afternoon testified,” reported the New York Times, which placed the race among the “outstanding examples of screen work” in a review of the year’s best films. The Times reviewer credited cinematographer Frank Urson with directing the sequence, and there might be something to this, since Urson was soon promoted to director and assigned another Reid racing film, Too Much Speed (1921). The car-train race in Roarig Road is filmed in motion, from onboard the train and a camera car, and benefits from intercutting those vantage points. By contrast, the film's first race, on the Santa Monica track, is disappointingly filmed from high angles with a stationary camera. The limitations of James Cruze as an action director were later made evident in The Covered Wagon, which lends further weight to the theory that Roaring Road's second race owed its potency to Urson.

Reports from exhibitors were even more enthusiastic than the trade press reviews, and confirmed the national appeal of Reid and The Roaring Road: “Good picture, the kind the fans like. You make no mistake in booking this.” (El Paso, TX); “Best Reid I have run to date. Pleased 90 per cent…Plenty of action. Reid always pleases my patrons.” (Bishop, TX); “Wallie always good here…Pleased to the limit.” (Mt. Vernon, KY).

But the greatest proof of popularity was that Roaring Road launched a cycle of films starring Reid as a racing driver. All of them had stories or scripts by Byron Morgan, all but one featured Theodore Roberts, and all were cut from the same checkered flag: “the youthful racing driver, who nonchalantly takes to the road or romance; the stern magnate who is either the employer of the aforementioned young scapegrace or the manufacturer of a rival car, and his daughter who is entered in the matrimonial stakes,” as Motion Picture News observed. The titles speak for themselves: Double Speed (1920), Excuse My Dust (1920), What’s Your Hurry (1920) and its follow-up Too Much Speed (1921), and Across the Continent (1922).

Excuse My Dust is notable for being a direct sequel to Roaring Road. “Toodles” Walden, now a father, is forbidden to race by his wife and father-in-law, but an auto company rivalry and the prospect of his record being broken lead to another race from Los Angeles to San Francisco, with “the Bear” also at the wheel. As an unambiguous sequel Excuse My Dust was unusual for its time, but neither the press nor Paramount made much of that, perhaps because of the staggered release system customary for silent features. A film would open in major downtown theaters and gradually move to minor neighborhood and rural ones over the course of two years. In 1921 three of Reid’s racing films (What’s Your Hurry, Roaring Road, and Excuse My Dust) were making their way across the country, and to audiences they must have blurred together.

By 1923 some critics were asking the producers to “give the Byron Morgan-Wallace Reid combination a rest…Four or five of these Roaring Road vehicles in two years is sufficient to tire both producer and audience. Particularly is this when the author uses one plot for the lot.” But producer Jesse Lasky disagreed; “the audience couldn’t get enough” of Reid behind the steering wheel. “We virtually turned these road racing movies out on an assembly line, and everyone was a money-maker.” Putting Reid in formulaic racing films was also a way for Paramount to fill product blocks. The studio practiced “star series booking,” whereby exhibitors were given (or pressured into accepting) the opportunity to screen a set of films starring a major player such as Reid, so long as they committed to book other, less desirable films too.

After Roaring Road, Reid and James Cruze reteamed for their sixth film of 1919, The Valley of Giants. While filming on location in Oregon, Reid was injured in a train accident and prescribed morphine to keep working: Addiction ensued. In 1923 Reid made Thirty Days, his final film with Cruze and the last he ever completed. His death the same year, from complications of morphine withdrawal, was of the biggest scandals of silent-era Hollywood. In any case, the public demand for films like The Roaring Road outlived its star. Byron Morgan contributed stories and scripts for Racing Hearts (1923) and The Lucky Devil (1925), starring Reid’s Paramount replacement Richard Dix, and then wrote the same sort of films for Reginald Denny at Universal. Reid’s race was run, but the movies and the automobile were far from the finish line.

About the Preservation
The Roaring Road was preserved by UCLA Film and Television Archive from a 35mm safety dupe negative. Funding was provided by Saving the Silents, a Save America’s Treasures project organized by the National Film Preservation Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Park Service, Department of the Interior. Further funding was provided by Tom E. Murray. A 20201 NFPF access grant funded scanning and digitization of the tinted preservation print.

About the Music
In creating the score for The Roaring Road I started with slightly “irregular” timings and dissonant notes, reflecting both the sputtering of the car engines and impulsivity of the characters. The compositional process, as in many of my scores, is to play through the film about a half dozen times. By that time I can usually notate the music completely from memory. The recording of this music was accomplished in a continuous, unedited, performance. — Michael Mortilla.

Michael D. Mortilla is a self-taught composer and pianist. He has composed for Martha Graham, the Chicago Symphony, 1996 Olympics, Library of Congress, Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences, CALARTS, Sony/Columbia, Severin Films, dozens of scores for the NFPF and literally thousands of productions in film, theater, dance, puppetry, animation, magic, comedy, and the concert hall. In 1984 Michael was granted a teaching license by the City of New York, subsequently moving to California in 1986 to teach at UC Santa Barbara. In 2000 Michael relocated his studio to Burbank, where he currently resides, maintaining an active schedule of composing and performing.

Further Reading and Viewing
Wallace Reid: The Life and Death of a Hollywood Idol by E.J. Fleming (McFarland, 2013) is a comprehensive biography. Sarah Phillips’ essay “Silent Screenwriter, Producer and Director: Marion Fairfax” can be found in When Women Wrote Hollywood: Essays on Female Screenwriters in the Early Film Industry (McFarland, 2018). The Roaring Road’s role as a franchise starter is examined in Stuart Henderson’s The Hollywood Sequel: History & Form, 1911-2010 (Bloomsbury, 2014).

Cecil B. DeMille’s The Affairs of Anatol, starring Wallace Reid and Theodore Roberts, was recently restored and released on Blu-Ray (Artcraft Pictures, 2026) by the Film Preserve and Maltese Film Works. The Valley of the Giants (1919) is viewable online, in a presentation by Edward Lorrusso derived from a video gifted to the Library of Congress by Moscow's Gosfilmofind archive, which holds the only surviving print.