The Ring was Hitchcock’s sixth film as director and his first film at British International Pictures, and, remarkably, his third film within a year. After directing Downhill and Easy Virtue, Hitchcock was frustrated and jumped at the chance to develop an idea of his own. Surprisingly, The Ring is Hitchcock’s one and only original screenplay, although he worked extensively alongside other writers throughout his career. Colleagues at the studio were impressed by the neatness of Hitchcock’s script and its writer’s grasp of structure. What’s more, writing for silent films came naturally to a director who already thought in visual terms. He was much less comfortable with dialogue, which goes some way to explain why he took no sole writing credit in any later films.The film is a love triangle melodrama set in the world of boxing. Hitchcock was fascinated by the details of boxing, and had attended championship bouts at the Albert Hall, which appears in the film, constructed through a visual sleight of hand. The title refers not just to the boxing ring, but to the wedding ring which unites upand-coming contender Jack ‘One Round’ Sander (Carl Brisson) and his girlfriend Mabel (Lilian Hall Davis, perhaps the most attractive and natural of his early heroines – and not one of the ‘Hitchcock blondes’), and to the threat to their relationship symbolised by an arm bracelet given to Mabel by Jack’s rival Bob (Ian Hunter).A full-scale fairground was built on the studio lot, populated by hundreds of extras, giving Hitchcock ample scope to indulge his taste for visual tricks and distortions, later also glimpsed in the party scenes, prompting critic Jonathan Rosenbaum to describe The Ring as “the most Germanic in style” of the silent films. Hitchcock’s fondness for the fairground milieu later surfaced in Saboteur (1942) and Strangers on a Train (1951). The Ring was shot by John J. ‘Jack’ Cox, who was already an experienced ‘effects’ cameraman, but was encouraged by Hitchcock to experiment with new techniques. He shot all ten of Hitchcock’s features at British International Pictures and reunited with him on The Lady Vanishes (1938), a record only beaten by Hitchcock’s lengthy collaboration with virtuoso cameraman Robert Burks. The Ring was hailed by reviewers as a “masterpiece” by the “Observer” and by Iris Barry in the “Daily Mail” as “the greatest production ever made” in England. Hitchcock described it to Truffaut only as a succès d’estime. The BFI National Archive received the original nitrate negative of The Ring from the Associated British Picture Corporation in 1959. The negative was already severely unstable and a new fine grain positive was made immediately. The restoration team, working with Deluxe 142, scanned this element at 2K resolution, and careful grading and manual restoration work enabled the removal of many of the defects of definition, contrast and warping inherent in the fine grain. The intertitles have been painstakingly reconstructed and an alphabet in the hand-crafted font of the original was created by scanning all the titles.