The Ring

An Australian boxer threatens the relationship of a young fighter and his fiancée in Alfred Hitchcock’s superior melodrama.

“Hitchcock’s screenplay combines the traditional story of the underdog with something much darker. The film turns out to be as much about sexual jealousy – Jack’s wife threatens to leave him for the champ – as about boxing.”
Geoffrey Macnab, Sight & Sound, October 1999

The title of Alfred Hitchcock’s sixth feature refers both to the world of boxing and a wedding band, as a fairground fighter faces competition for his fiancée when a professional Australian fighter arrives on the scene. Featuring the only original screenplay Hitchcock ever wrote, The Ring is one of the director’s best silent films.

As with The Lodger, the film is suffused with expressionist touches, using symbolism and heavily stylised shots to convey mood and meaning. This was probably influenced by Hitchcock’s time spent in Germany, where filmmakers had pioneered cinematic expressionism, in films such as The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920) and Nosferatu (1922).

Lead actors Carl Brisson and Lilian Hall-Davis would both act with Hitchcock again – Brisson in another romantic melodrama, The Manxman (1929), and Hall-Davis in The Farmer’s Wife (1928), a comedy.