I’m just gonna cut straight to it on this one and say I wasn’t left so excited about the Hitchcock silents at the end of this as I was at the end of The Pleasure Garden. I’m watching a lot of documentaries and introductions etc on the various DVDs as I watch my way through Hitchcock and there’s a lot of praise for this, particularly from French critics (who championed Hitchcock as an auteur long before the rest of us), for it’s elegant cyclic structure, itself resembling the title, which in turn refers to several components of the plot – the boxing ring that forms the setting, a wedding ring, and an armband that comes to represent adultery in another circle (well, a triangle) of love…

I can appreciate this I guess from a design perspective or something, but for me it just never pulled me in emotionally as much as The Pleasure Garden did at certain points. To make a bizarre comparison, in an odd way this kind of reminds me of how I felt about Inception… I can totally see what people are excited about but simply can’t see why it’s making them so excited, lol. In any case it’s certainly interesting as this was one of the only movies Hitchcock ever directed that also had his name on the screenplay, from an original story, and yes, it is rather elegantly designed.

Tags: boxing, Hitchcock, love triangle, silent

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