The Ring (1927) - film review

’One Round’ Jack Sander is the star attraction of a travelling fair, an amateur boxer who is confident he can hold anyone for one round in the boxing ring.  His luck holds until the day he is beaten by a professional boxer named Bob Corby.  With his winnings, Corby buys an expensive bracelet for Jack’s fiancée, Mabel, and Jack’s reward is the offer of a trial fight, which opens up the prospect of a lucrative boxing career. When he wins his trial fight, Jack marries Mabel and begins work as a professional boxer.  Whilst Jack is busy winning matches, Mabel has started to have an affair with Bob Corby.  When he discovers his wife’s infidelity, Jack looks forward to the day when he will face Corby in the boxing ring...

The Ring marked the beginning of a new phase in the career of Alfred Hitchcock.  It was his first film for British International Pictures, the studio that successfully lured him away from Michael Balcon’s company Gainsborough.  Having scored an early success with The Lodger (1927), Hitchcock was disappointed with his next two Gainsborough films, Downhill (1927) and Easy Virtue (1928), partly because these were adaptations of stage plays.  British International Pictures not only offered Hitchcock more money but also greater control over the subjects for his films.  Although Hitchcock’s relationship with BIP would ultimately turn sour (and it would be Balcon who would later come to his rescue), things began well, and The Ring lived up to the expectations of both its director and its studio. 

The Ring is unique in that it was the only film for which Hitchcock wrote an original screenplay – in collaboration with his wife, Alma Reville, who had a major (and usually uncredited) input into most of his films.  For anyone even vaguely familiar with Hitchcock’s work, his choice of subject is a surprising one – a conventional melodrama involving the familiar love triangle, set in the world of professional boxing.  This exemplifies the rich diversity that we see in Hitchcock’s early films, which included burlesque comedies and romantic melodramas as well as the familiar suspense crime thrillers which came to dominate much of his output in later years.

Regarded by some as one of Hitchcock’s best silent films, The Ring shows a number of stylistic and textual influences from contemporary German and French cinema – the expressionist flourishes of the former combined effectively with the poetry and naturalism of the latter.   We can see many examples of Hitchcock’s love of experimentation with lighting, composition and camerawork, which include some ingenious point-of-view shots that convey the feelings and impressions of the protagonists.  The boxing sequences are remarkable for a film of this period, being shot and edited in a way that captures the ferocity, pace and drama of the sport as experienced by both the spectator and the player.  The success of this film provided a much-needed boost to Hitchcock’s confidence and allowed him to blaze a trail in British cinema which others were bound to follow.

© James Travers 2008

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