The Ring (1927, Alfred Hitchcock) (Patreon)

50/100

Narrative's not really worth discussing—Hitchcock wrote it himself and clearly did the world a favor by subsequently abandoning that discipline. Boxing rivalry, romantic rivalry, yadda yadda yadda. Even in an otherwise forgettable proto-programmer like this, though, his visual storytelling often stands out. Lillian Hall-Davis serves up a range of flintily lascivious expressions (certainly she's stronger than either of the men), but nothing in her performance can match the simple insert of "One Round" Jack slipping the wedding ring onto Mabel’s finger, causing the bangle that Bob had earlier given her to slip from her upper arm (out of frame) down to her wrist. When Jack's getting pummeled during the climactic bout, we learn that he's fought his way back indirectly: Rather than show the action (which he does plentifully beforehand and afterwards), Hitchcock trains the camera on a random spectator who starts putting his coat on as if to leave, then suddenly stops in surprise, removes it, and sits back down. Stuff like this isn't enough to prevent The Ring from getting bogged down in bland melodrama, though, and Mabel's inconstancy (at best; actual infidelity is implicit) has a misogynistic tinge that, while not unusual for 1927, still makes the film harder to enjoy. (N-word in the intertitles, too, which I can't recall having seen in a British silent before.) 

One particular moment here made me realize that certain visual techniques are unique to the silent era, even though there's no good reason why they couldn't be used today. They just aren't. Jack comes home to find Mabel gone, then looks down at an empty table; Hitchcock briefly dissolves to show the aforementioned bangle sitting there, and we understand that Jack is registering its absence now. I tried to picture that dissolve in a contemporary film and couldn't do it—a director might take a similar approach, but it'd be a hard cut to a flashback image of the same table (most likely playing off a close-up of the actor in thought), now with the missing object on it. Nobody except Guy Maddin would ever think to dissolve the object into view, as if physically retrieving it from the character's memory, and then dissolve it away again. The hard cut/flashback approach isn't superior in any way that I can discern, yet somehow the dissolve looks archaic. Were I making films myself, I'd be thinking about this long and hard, wondering how I might capitalize upon it.