Hitchcock’s British Films

The Ring (1927)

With The Ring Hitchcock makes a fresh start. He filmed his own story and screenplay, and for a new studio, British International Pictures. The result is a lively film with at least two points in common with the earlier work.1 Again Hitchcock develops a pattern of circles, rectangles, and arcs. And thematically, The Ring deals with the basic Hitchcock situation: a man who thinks he is secure in his job and with his sweetheart loses both to an outside power. More plausibly than in Downhill, the hero manages to recover them. The credits appear over a fight scene to clarify the title’s “ring.” “One Round” Jack Sanders (Carl Brisson) is the hero, a midway boxer challenging customers to last a round with him. Sanders demolishes a huge sailor off camera while his trainer (Gordon Harker) holds the sailor’s suit for him, confident of his early—and horizontal—return. Another large challenger, egged on by his lady, trips on the rope and falls down for the count. So One Round has a good punch and luck in his corner. His sweetheart (Lilian Hall-Davis) sells tickets for him outside. The girl attracts the Australian heavyweight champion, Bob Corby (Ian Hunter), to the tent, then to the ring, where he knocks out Sanders. Courting the girl, Corby hires Sanders as a sparring partner. The Ring 1927 Hitchcock’s British Films 42 While mopping Sanders’s brow, the girl stares at Corby in fascination, mussing her beau’s face. Though Sanders and the girl marry, she is still intrigued by Corby. By filling the church with the couple’s carny colleagues, Hitchcock shows mismatches: Siamese twin girls arguing over which side of the church to sit on, the giant and the dwarf entering together. The carnies also establish the outsider community that a similar group has in Saboteur, representing the simple society that Sanders abandons for Corby’s circle. At almost exactly the midpoint of the film, Sanders’s wife is assumed to be Corby’s from her attentions to him after a bout. On the night Sanders wins the right to challenge Corby for the British title, his wife is out late with Corby. Sanders and his fairground friends are left alone with their flattened champagne. When she returns they quarrel; Sanders becomes violent with her and she leaves. The climax of the film is Sanders’s title fight with Corby. His wife goes to Corby’s rooms and sits in his corner. The fight itself is an exciting piece of film work, because it’s the first fight that Hitchcock shows in any detail. Our appetite was whetted by glimpses of the earlier fights. Hitchcock enhances the suspense by cutting away to the enthralled audience, like the tennis match in Strangers on a Train. For all its rhetoric , Hitchcock’s fight has a more plausible choreography than some of the work of Muhammad Ali. Sanders anticipates Ali by lying on the ropes to recover his energies. Hitchcock interposes only one title— the referee’s warning, “Don’t hold, Corby”—to confirm the breathless pace, too fast to pause for words.2 Sanders freezes when he sees his wife in Corby’s corner, so Corby has the first edge. Saved by the bell, Sanders recovers. He revives fully when his wife takes his hand and says, “Jack . . . I’m with you. In your corner.” Jack knocks out Corby. The three basic images in the film are the rectangle, the circle, and the arc, but the film doesn’t feel that schematic. These shapes establish important contrasts in movement and value. The rectangles are modes of perception—the portals in the tent through which the girl exchanges alluring looks with either Corby or Sanders; the door and the window in the gypsy’s caravan; the mirror that triggers Jack’s jealous fantasy; the picture of Corby with which the girl covers her heart 43 The Ring when Jack attacks her. The boxer’s ring is, of course, a rectangle. As a mode of perception it suggests that the girl appraises her men by their performance in the fights. Jack’s career and his marriage both hinge on his beating Corby. The film abounds with ring images, either complete rings (circles) or pieces of rings (arcs). The film opens with carnival scenes—a drum beating in close-up, people going around on swings, people going back and forth in arcs on swings, the sweeping view from the swings, a close-up...