Review by
Eric Hillis
Directed by: Alfred Hitchcock
Starring: Carl Brisson, Lillian Hall-Davis, Ian Hunter, Harry Terry, Gordon Harker,
Forrester Harvey, Billy Wells
Hitchcock: The Beginning is a new
11-disc bluray boxset from Studiocanal featuring 10 of Alfred Hitchcock's early films and a new documentary, Becoming Hitchcock, which explores the legacy of Hitchcock's first sound film,
1929's Blackmail.
In the second part of our 11-part review of the boxset, we look
at The Ring.
The title of Alfred Hitchcock's 1927 melodrama,
The Ring, carries a double meaning. It refers to the squared circle of the boxing
arena, and also to a wedding band. It's a story of infidelity and pugilism
in which a boxer throws many punches and receives many blows, none more
winding than the one from his unfaithful wife.
Boxer 'One-Round' Jack Sander (Carl Brisson) ekes out a living
knocking out paying chumps at a carnival. His nickname refers to his
consistency in ending all of his bouts in the first round. This changes
when he is challenged by a stranger, who Jack doesn't realise is Bob Corby
(Ian Hunter), the current heavyweight champion of England. Bob
takes Jack past the first round before laying him out. Teased by his
friends, Jack feels utterly humiliated, and that's without him being aware
of Bob's flirtation with his girlfriend, ticket girl Mabel (Lillian Hall-Davis). Bob even uses the modest prize money he won for beating Jack to gift
Mabel an arm bracelet. To get close to Mabel, Bob takes Jack on as his
sparring partner. Mabel and Jack are wed, but Mabel soon begins cheating
on her husband with Bob. Jack decides that the only way to win back Mabel
is to beat Bob in the ring, and so he begins his vengeance-fuelled ascent
through the boxing ranks.
Though it was his fourth feature, Hitchcock considered
The Ring the second "Hitchcock picture" after
The Lodger. It's the only one of his films in which he is credited as the sole
writer, though it's believed his regular collaborator of the silent era,
scriptwriter Eliot Stannard, made some contributions to the
screenplay. Hitchcock always gladly admitted to struggling to write
characters, and the one-note archetypes of The Ring are
testament to this. Displaying a lack of nuance, Jack, Bob and Mabel are
reduced to little more than than the hero, the villain and the woman in
between. We're never really given any motivation for wanting Jack to
succeed in winning back Mabel, as she's such an unrepentant gold-digger
that she seems a lost cause.
Unsurprisingly, it's in the visual side of the storytelling that
Hitchcock comes roaring out of his corner. Switching from Gainsborough to
the newly formed British International Pictures, Hitchcock was given his
biggest budget to date, and if you believe some reports,
The Ring was the biggest budget afforded to a British
production at that point. Though it's essentially an intimate drama about
three people, all the money is up on the screen. The movie opens with an
elaborate introduction to the boisterous setting of the carnival, filled
with hundreds of extras and rendered through a dazzling montage. The
climax in the Royal Albert Hall (a setting Hitchcock would return to for
both versions of The Man Who Knew Too Much) wasn't actually filmed in the hall but through brilliant use of
the Schüfftan process and the matte paintings of
Walter Percy Day, we fully believe we're in that iconic London
arena.
The roots of a century of boxing movies to follow can be found in
The Ring, which establishes both the visual language and narrative tropes that
would become a staple of the sub-genre. Hitchcock visualises Jack's rise
through a montage of billboards displaying fight cards: as the seasons
progress, Jack's name grows larger as he moves up the successive cards -
we've seen a variation of this in almost every boxing melodrama since. The
fight itself feels surprisingly modern, with Hitchcock placing his moving
camera inside the ring, creating the illusion that the fighters are
punching the audience, a technique Martin Scorsese would jump on for
Raging Bull.
But it's in smaller moments that Hitchcock displays his real flair for
visual storytelling. When Jack is taken past the first round by Bob in
their carnival brawl, Hitchcock cuts to a rundown "Round 1" card being
replaced by a glossy, never-used "Round 2" card. As a demonstration of
Mabel's infidelity and Jack's naivete, the latter fills his friends'
glasses with champagne but orders them not to drink before Mabel comes
home; Hitchcock dissolves from the bubbling champers to glasses filled
with unappealing flat liquid. When Jack takes his frustration out on a
punching bag, Hitchcock superimposes Bob's smirking face over the
bag.
In the bracelet given to Mabel we see an early example of Hitchcock's
ability to make us root for a nominal villain. Hoping to conceal the gift
from Jack, Mabel covers it with her hand. We find ourselves cringing in
fear as the scurrilous Bob tries to get Mabel to shake hands with Jack and
reveal the incriminating adornment. Hitchcock has made us complicit with a
guilty woman, an idea he would fully embrace two years later with
Blackmail.
Modern viewers will balk at the casual racism of the era on display, with
one particularly shocking use of language in an interstitial, but the
movie is progressive in its centring of Jack and his working class
friends, one of whom is a black man whose race is never mentioned. A
half-decade before Tod Browning's
Freaks, Hitchcock displays an unfashionable affection for carnies, something he
would later reprise with the troupe of circus performers who aid the hero
of Saboteur (a gag involving conjoined twins arguing over
which side of a church aisle to sit is as amusingly effective as it is
politically incorrect).
If the lack of nuance keeps us from becoming fully engaged with the
overall narrative, Hitchcock's skill in crafting individual sequences
means there is plenty to keep us gripped in The Ring. In his striking use of montage and visual effects, the director teases
what's to come in his remarkable career.
The Ring is part of
Studiocanal's 'Hitchcock: The Beginning' bluray boxset, available from
December 16th.