The Ring (1927)
Country: GB
Technical: bw 72/89m silent
Director: Alfred Hitchcock
Cast: Carl Brisson, Lillian Hall-Davis, Ian Hunter, Gordon Harker
Synopsis:
A girl working as cashier at a fairground boxing attraction is engaged to the site's mealticket, but her easy virtue yields to an established prizefighter whom she has persuaded to match himself against One Round Jack.
Review:
Dramatically fluid Hitchcock melodrama (the opening scene takes about twenty minutes) which proved something of a moneyspinner itself. Here again we have the 'insubstantial girl' of his early pictures, the guilty secret and the love triangle. The 'ring' of the title alludes not only to the boxing milieu but also to the ring of marriage, the arm bracelet with which the champion 'enslaves' the heroine, and even the circular, 'Fortune's wheel' nature of the plot. Although there is no murder, the film is unmistakeably the work of its director in the power it invests inanimate objects to reflect or shape the emotional behaviour of his protagonists, and there is abundant use of dissolves, superimpositions and internalised cutaways. Ian Hunter strikes a transatlantic figure with his stetson, and is every inch one of those suave Hitchcock villains of the thirties, rather than the hardened, flat-nosed pugilist he is supposed to be.
Country: GB
Technical: bw 72/89m silent
Director: Alfred Hitchcock
Cast: Carl Brisson, Lillian Hall-Davis, Ian Hunter, Gordon Harker
Synopsis:
A girl working as cashier at a fairground boxing attraction is engaged to the site's mealticket, but her easy virtue yields to an established prizefighter whom she has persuaded to match himself against One Round Jack.
Review:
Dramatically fluid Hitchcock melodrama (the opening scene takes about twenty minutes) which proved something of a moneyspinner itself. Here again we have the 'insubstantial girl' of his early pictures, the guilty secret and the love triangle. The 'ring' of the title alludes not only to the boxing milieu but also to the ring of marriage, the arm bracelet with which the champion 'enslaves' the heroine, and even the circular, 'Fortune's wheel' nature of the plot. Although there is no murder, the film is unmistakeably the work of its director in the power it invests inanimate objects to reflect or shape the emotional behaviour of his protagonists, and there is abundant use of dissolves, superimpositions and internalised cutaways. Ian Hunter strikes a transatlantic figure with his stetson, and is every inch one of those suave Hitchcock villains of the thirties, rather than the hardened, flat-nosed pugilist he is supposed to be.
Country: GB
Technical: bw 72/89m silent
Director: Alfred Hitchcock
Cast: Carl Brisson, Lillian Hall-Davis, Ian Hunter, Gordon Harker
Synopsis:
A girl working as cashier at a fairground boxing attraction is engaged to the site's mealticket, but her easy virtue yields to an established prizefighter whom she has persuaded to match himself against One Round Jack.
Review:
Dramatically fluid Hitchcock melodrama (the opening scene takes about twenty minutes) which proved something of a moneyspinner itself. Here again we have the 'insubstantial girl' of his early pictures, the guilty secret and the love triangle. The 'ring' of the title alludes not only to the boxing milieu but also to the ring of marriage, the arm bracelet with which the champion 'enslaves' the heroine, and even the circular, 'Fortune's wheel' nature of the plot. Although there is no murder, the film is unmistakeably the work of its director in the power it invests inanimate objects to reflect or shape the emotional behaviour of his protagonists, and there is abundant use of dissolves, superimpositions and internalised cutaways. Ian Hunter strikes a transatlantic figure with his stetson, and is every inch one of those suave Hitchcock villains of the thirties, rather than the hardened, flat-nosed pugilist he is supposed to be.