The Ring

The Ring 1927 U.K. (89 minutes) written and directed by Alfred Hitchcock; cinematography by John J. Cox.

This visually inventive black & white silent film, Alfred Hitchcock’s fourth feature and his only original screenplay, is a terrific boxing picture with more life than a great many technicolor talkies.

In The Ring, one of film’s great visual storytellers sets a love story amid the kinetic activity of an amusement park and the drama of the boxing ring. What we see through Hitchcock’s camera eye looks similar to the dynamic camera work that was coming out of 1920s Weimar Germany and the Kuleshov Workshop of the State Film School in Moscow. He assembles his shots in an efficient narrative which guides a viewer’s thoughts and emotions, even makes the viewer a vicarious participant in that one can feel the movement and hear the sounds.

 
We know that Hitchcock worked at the famous UFA film studios in Berlin briefly in the mid-1920s and joined F.W. Murnau on the set while Murnau was shooting Der Letzte Mann (1924-The Last Laugh). We also know that he and his lifelong collaborator Alma Reville saw many German and Soviet films in London. But rather than simply having ‘absorbed’ influence, Hitchcock’s work suggests that this experience inspired and encouraged him to develop thinking already advanced on these lines, ideas that continued to develop throughout his long career into the visual poetry of such films as North by Northwest (1959) and The Birds (1963).

His main difficulty at first must have been selling this vision to producers who expected to see adaptations of traditional stage drama. But this challenge likely spurred Hitchcock to invent even more ingenious ways to tell stories without words. The Ring is the first film that shows the range of his genius for telling a story in pictures. The facts that he just had left Gaumont and that this also was the first movie for his new employer, British International Pictures, may have helped.

The opening sequence brings the viewer through a busy weekend or holiday amusement park in a manner similar to Dziga Vertov’s later Man with a Movie Camera (1929-Человек с кино-аппаратом) or Robert Siodmak and Edgar Ulmer’s People on Sunday (1930-Menschen am Sonntag). The viewer arrives at the front of a booth in which a crowd is amusing itself by dunking a carny. The carny is a black man, and the scene is sure to offend mainstream sensibilities in the 21st century US. A small boy hits the man in the face with an egg, to great gales of laughter from the crowd, including a policeman. But this breaks the rules of the game. The white booth manager sets the policeman after the boy and his friend.

Two skeptical dunking spectators then move to a nearby booth which features ‘One Round’ Jack Sander (Carl Brisson), who welcomes all comers to last a round with him in the boxing ring. People pay admission to see this carny pugilist make fools of young bucks, blowhards, drunks and others, including middle-aged men put up by their wives. Again, the humor is heavy-handed and physical in a way that would not be acceptable as entertainment in the US and the UK today, the crowd amused by others’ discomfort and distress—and not just because they have black skin.

It is noteworthy that one of Jack’s team is a black man who, like the others, looks as though he actually could be a boxer, and appears throughout the rest of the film as one of ‘the boys’. Hitchcock knew boxing as a fan and frequent fight attendee. Brisson himself had been a prizefighter before the First World War, and uncredited cast members include legendary British boxer Eugene Corri (as MC) and ‘Bombardier Billy Wells’, British and British Empire champion from 1911 until 1919.

The two spectators in our story turn out to be Bob Corby, ‘Heavyweight Champion of Australia’ (Ian Hunter), and his manager, James Ware (Forrester Harvey). They are scouting local talent for a sparring partner for Corby. Corby also is drawn to Mabel (Lillian Hall Davis), the ticket-taker outside the boxing tent, who is engaged to be Jack’s wife. 

In a dynamic sequence of shots, Corby, removing his jacket and hat and stepping into the ring in a bow tie, packs the house when he goes an unprecedented four rounds with Jack. Jack has natural ability but needs seasoning to become a professional boxer; he and Mabel also have emotional growing up to do. Mabel marries Jack, but falls for the celebrity champ Corby.

At Mabel and Jack’s wedding ceremony, another ring—Mabel’s wedding band—is misplaced, confused with a button and then recovered by Jack’s bemused best man and trainer (Gordon Harker) in beautifully mimed sequence. Jack places this ring on Mabel’s hand, where it remains.
Thus the story shows Jack grow in two arenas, as a boxer and a husband, culminating in his heavyweight fight with Corby for the title and to win back Mabel’s affection.