The Road Of Life (1955)

★★★★ · TROL · pauls son · 2010-09-21

I liked this, it was a little gothic and well done. Even the acting was above-par for the time. I love old soaps even though the HORRIBLE organ music almost destroys my enjoyment. I think soaps would have been taken much more seriously then if they'd had REAL scores and not the campy organ music.

★★★ · The Road Of Life · Classic Soap Fan · 2014-01-05

Note that the network was CBS, not NBC. As for the organ music, that was part of what made soaps the soaps. The ones with superior writing and acting tended to endure. When you think about it, doing a live broadcast 5 days a week was an accomplishment. As Ann Flood, famous for her role of Nancy Pollock Karr on The Edge of Night, pointed out, they did the equivalent of a feature film every week. I remember some very well executed, intense scenes from live broadcasts of The Edge of Night, which was the last serial broadcast live on a regular basis. As for The Road of Life, I do not perceive…

★★ · Great example of a 1950s soap opera · Christofer Meissner · 2011-03-17

This episode of "The Road of Life" is a really nice example of the genre as it existed in the 1950s. The acting style, the camerawork, the narrative, and the music are all characteristic of this kind of show in this period. I agree with the previous reviewer that the organ music gives the show (and shows like it) a low-rent quality that sounds quite ridiculous to our ears now. I suspect that even at the time producers knew that the organ music was a bit tacky, but that they had little choice given budgetary constraints and the convention of the use of organ music in soap operas (a convention…