The Ring [PG]

Life as a small-time circus boxer isn’t treating ‘One Round’ Jack very well. Business is slow and he cannot afford to marry the ticket girl whom he loves. But this changes when a champion fighter takes him under his and his manager’s wing. Within no time at all, Jack is married to his love and happy as can be, but his marriage soon starts to erode as Bob the champion fighter and Jack’s sparring partner begins making advances towards his wife. 

One of Hitchcock’s original works, written as well as directed by him, The Ring sees Carl Brisson reinterpreting his role of the loving, but neglected and cheated husband as seen in The Manxman. Hitchcock’s casting of Brisson has in both films proved to be a class move as his boyish face, bright eyes, and radiant enthusiasm and amorousness consistently compels you to get behind him and root for him from his corner, taking a negative and sometimes violence-willing stance towards all those characters who wrong him. You can’t help but love and feel so sympathetic towards whatever character Brisson is playing and Hitchcock’s casting of him within these love triangle dramas really works. 

Life as a small-time circus boxer isn’t treating ‘One Round’ Jack very well. Business is slow and he cannot afford to marry the ticket girl whom he loves. But this changes when a champion fighter takes him under his and his manager’s wing. Within no time at all, Jack is married to his love and happy as can be, but his marriage soon starts to erode as Bob the champion fighter and Jack’s sparring partner begins making advances towards his wife. 

As mentioned before, The Ring chronicles the love triangle between a husband, his wife, and his sparring partner. Right from the off, there’s this great level of complication that comes into the mix as conflicts between love and obligation come head to head. 

What I can’t understand from this movie is how the girl seems to get off scot-free when in actual fact all the nasty dramas and complications that are happening are all her fault. Aside from an unfortunate end her sleeve is met with, the bloody tart walks away unpunished and all we can do is yell at Brisson to punch a whole right threw her boyfriend’s stomach and then tell her he’s done with her anyway. Although your mind is telling you that the heroine’s a bitch and all that, you don’t see red when she’s on the screen. She really just swans through the entire thing, without really receiving any sort of punishment that is due her. 

Starring Lillian Hall-Davis, Ian Hunter, Forrester Harvey, Harry Terry, and Gordon Harker, The Ring is a another enjoyable drama from Hitchcock’s repertoire that, although can get a little bit boring in some places, still manages to achieve vocal exclamations of both hatred and joy. It’s another good one filled with romance, drama, action, and comedy and, as with many things Hitchcock, there are few straight lines in it.