The Ring fascinates because it is not a suspense film and yet experiments with the tropes through which Hitchcock created suspense. There's something that Raymond Durgnat summed up as “petty, edgy, unnerving” here. The setting is the world of boxing in which hungry amateurs vie with professional prizefighters for money, status, and love. A young fairground pugilist marries his ticket-taker girlfriend, only to find himself openly cuckolded by his rival, the Champion. The title The Ring refers to the boxing arena, the wedding ring, and a bracelet the girl wears, a gift from her lover, shaped in the form of a serpent. Not a very original sin, perhaps, in the hands of another director, but the young wife bizarrely flaunts her infidelity, mocking her helpless mate through symbols even he can comprehend. Hitchcock revels in all the fairground “business,” in the grotesque masks of the thrill-seekers, and, as both fighters come up in the world, in the equally frantic flapper society.