The Road to Ruin is a 1928 American silent black-and-white exploitation film directed by Norton S. Parker and starring Helen Foster.

[2] Due to its popularity, a sound version of the film was released late in 1928.

The film is about a teenage girl, Sally Canfield, whose life is led astray by sex, smoking, and drinking, and ruined by an abortion.

[3] Director Norton S. Parker later told his wife that lead actress Helen Foster was much like her character in that she was relatively naive; during the filming of the strip poker scenes, Parker kept a bottle of hard alcohol to offer Foster "liquid courage".

The film was shot by Henry Cronjager using a hand-cranked camera typical of the era, but at faster-than-normal crank speed; this helped fill up each reel and getting the final film to feature length, but had the effect of making all the action in the film move slower.