The Ring

I watched this the same day I watched Survival Quest, a well-meaning movie where the most prominent issues were length and pacing; an over-long first act, the utter lack of a second, and not enough movie to do justice to the story. It is amusing to me that I found The Ring to be the mirror image of Survival Quest; a movie where the biggest problem is too much movie affecting the pacing. One of Alfred Hitchcock's eight silent movies, The Ring is about a sideshow boxer, "One Round" Jack, who gets pulled into the orbit of the Australian heavyweight champion. They meet at a carnival, where Jack works as a sideshow attraction, challenging amateurs to try and last one round. The champ, Bob, takes up the challenge, primarily to steal Jack's fiance, the ticket girl, Mabel. From there, he brings in Jack as a sparring partner and woos Mabel, who is starstruck by Bob's skill and prominence and becomes smitten. Jack has to fight for his woman, to validate himself as a boxer, and to put a stop to Bob coming in between him and Mabel. I was surprised at how much I liked The Ring. This is the fourth of the eight (available) silent films he made. So far, they haven't had the best track record; The Lodger is good, but the other two I've seen up to this point, Downhill and Easy Virtue, are right next to each other at the bottom of my ranking. One of Downhill's major issues was a near-total lack intertitle cards due to Hitchcock thinking the story told itself (it didn't), while Easy Virtue was buried among an avalanche of verbiage that rivals most Roger Waters solo albums. I can report that The Ring manages to not only have a reasonably balanced amount of intertitle cards, it also manages to convey plenty of its story through the acting and images. Mabel's dissatisfaction with Jack being a sideshow attraction and a joke against real competition, Jack going from naively happy about the opportunity to resenting Bob and his machinations, and Bob being a condescending schmuck, all play out wonderfully on visuals alone. The intertitle cards help drive points home that need it without stopping the movie dead in its tracks. The Ring was only Hitchcock's fourth movie, and he was definitely still growing as a director. There is little in the way of visual flourish or his signature directing style, but the movie is still directed well enough. Just very workmanlike. The Ring is Hitchcock's only original screenplay, and it is a fine enough job, much more driven by the visual aspect and getting across basic ideas than deeper exploration. As such, the characters are basic sketches; Jack is young, hungry, and hopeful, while Bob is cocky and conniving. Mabel gets the least amount of detail, as her crush on Bob happens so quickly and her loyalties tested so easily, it makes her almost unlikeable. It would've been nice to see some of the extra time in this movie spent coloring in her character just a little more. That leads me to The Ring's one big fault; at an hour forty five, this movie is far too long. While it does manage to keep the attention and probably has the briskest overall pace of any of Hitchcock's silent movies, there is some flab in this movie that could've easily been cut. Had this been 90 minutes, it would've moved like a bullet. It's clear this is a movie made by a young man who was a little too close to the material to know it needed some cuts. That doesn't make it bad, but it does lessen what it could've been. I went into The Ring thinking this was another silent-era Hitchcock movie I had to get through to complete my quest to see all his films. I am rather surprised to find that it is an enjoyable movie. You definitely have to appreciate silent movies, and you have to be able to divorce yourself from expecting anything like a Hitchcock movie you're more familiar with. If you meet those criteria, and are interested in doing a deeper dive on some of his less famous work, I'd say this is worth a watch.