Alfred Hitchcock’s rare silent masterpiece, The Ring

Film As most of you will know, the BFI's recently undertaken a restoration of Alfred Hitchcock's silent era and some from the press office for The Space has been in touch about an exciting connected event. Here's the guts of the press release:

"The premier of Alfred Hitchcock’s rare silent masterpiece, The Ring, recently restored by the BFI National Archive, will be streamed live for the first time ever from London’s Hackney Empire exclusively on The Space www.TheSpace.org on Friday 13th July at 20.00 (GMT). The premiere will be accompanied by a specially commissioned soundtrack composed and performed by award-winning jazz musician Soweto Kinch.

"Marking it as a worthy precursor to Scorsese’s Raging Bull, Hitchcock’s melodrama tells the story of a love-triangle between boxer Bob Corby, his sparring partner Jack Sander and Jack’s beautiful wife Mabel. The bouts in the ring become more than gamely sparring, leading up to the championship fight (famously set in the Albert Hall) between the two men for the love of Mabel.

"Since its launch in May, digital arts service The Space has become the online destination for film fans everywhere offering a selection of free and on-demand films, whenever you want it and wherever you happen to be, featuring unmissable live events, rare archive material and interactive collections, with new material added every week.

"In the run up to the live stream, The Space will feature Hitchcock documentaries including Hitchcock and cinema in the 20s and Hitchcock and the Evolution of Style. There will also be an interview Hitchcock gave to the BBC programme Late Night Line-Up in 1966."

When I was watching all of Hitch's films in order, I only gave most of them some cursory comments, mostly because the prints on the dvd copies I watched were pretty ropey. Nevertheless, here again's what I thought of The Ring:

"Every director seems to make a boxing film at some point and Hitch’s is The Ring, in which two prizefighters literally come to blows over the love of a woman. Scorsese must have reviewed this before going into Raging Bull; some of the smoky shots of the boxers in close-up and punches landing are almost exactly replicated in one of the fight sequences there. The psychology here is a bit more simplistic -- most of these early films feature some kind of love triangle and in none of them is there a suggestion that the woman could tell both of them to give over and make her own way in the world. It’s a reminder of the time in which they were made – that and in the case of The Ring, the sudden use of the n-word in one of the captions."