In december I bought an Alfred Hitchcock collection with 18 of his movies from the 1920s up to the 1950s. So I looked for the oldest unseen movie on the box, and it was the Ring. Only language to watch it in was "German", so I wondered, maybe German subtitles for the Cards, or actually German title cards? No...
The whole movie was dubbed. Not just narrated, but completely dubbed, background noises, people talking. It was such a weird Feeling, watching a clear 20s movie with the typical 20s acting, but with German dub on top.
That being said, I really enjoyed the movie and I like that it slimmed it down to 85 minutes instead of 115.
It's a love story by heart, about a boxer and his girlfriend. The girlfriend falls in love with a different boxer who is able to beat him. So the only way to get her back is to train hard and beat that boxer.
The movie starts off with sideshow attractions, and the main event is a boxer who sais he will beat anyone in the first round. And he does. But then one chique guy who is interested in the door girl, the girlfriend of the boxer, turns out to actually beat him.
What I like about this is that at first I felt like the chique guy, being mocked and then beating the strong boxer, would be our hero, because we root for him, the underdog, instead of the cocky boxer who thinks too much of himself. But then after he is beat, things turn and quickly you learn to root for him, while the chique guy becomes the asshole.
Of course this is not the greatest work of Hitchcock, it's one of his first. But it's still a fun watch. I'm not certain if any of these techniques were new, but I was impressed of some of the things we got to see. At one point, two characters are talking, but the ones attention goes to something happening further away in a window, and we see it because Hitchcock keeps the guy he's talking to in frame but superimposing on the other side a zoom of the things going on in the background.
In one really cool scene we have a billboard with the rankings of the different boxers, and the passage of time is shown by our hero climbing up that ranking.
Last but not least, the boxing fights were well done. Sometimes we only see them from afar, but sometimes we are close. Very close. In fact in some scenes, the boxer is fighting the camera. I thought that was a great idea that I think was also used later in Raging Bull.
The story is a little cliche, and while I understand that this had to be the ending in a movie in 1927, I still didn't like it. But the movie surely was a fun time, and I think it was even easier to watch with the dub. It was a fun time and I'm rating it 3 out of 5 stars.
