What's the story on the runniung time of this film? I have a DVD @85min and a VHS@124min. Maltin lists 73min, IMDb lists 2: 73min and 111m. Is there someone who can clear this up for me? Also: was THE RING ever put on laserdisc? Also: which is the absolute BEST transfer of this film ?
shareJust recently 3 french boxsets came out that are available through amazon.fr
One of them includes The Ring together with Champagne (previously unreleased), The Manxman and The Farmers Wife. The quality is dramatically improved compared to the previous releases. Non french people wouldnt have to bother because all those films are speechless unless their players support the region format.
Concerning the running time and Laserdisc i`m not sure. Mine is the 89 min Laserlight DVD. However i believe most of the differences in those statements arent due to missing scenes but different pressings formats of the discs. I noticed that some of such early movies are slowed down in the transfer as it would better represent the actual movements that happened compared to the original yet unsophisticated filming that shot less than a second of actual action that occured.
Thank you for the info on the French discs--I checked Amazon.fr and unfortunately they are "Region 2" so they can't be played on U.S.A. machines. (WHY do they do that to us?)
As for the length discrepancy: your explanation/guess is a good one but I'm not convinced because the difference in running times is so great...
I do hope these "restored" French prints will make it over here someday...Of the 3 different versions of THE RING I've got, none of them are pristine--in fact they're all pretty bad, especially the framing. This film needs to be "window boxed"...
Oh ok
However at least here in Germany we can get multiregion DVD players or we can set it region-codefree. Mine is a codefree player that plays every regions format. Another issue for americans is obviously that the TVs run on NTSC while some countries run on PAL so you`d have to make sure that your TV supports PAL either. For all those technical aspects i highly recommend this site
http://www.daveyp.com/hitchcock/forums/index.php
Have fun
AL--thank you for being so thoughtful. I have been looking into getting some sort of "dissabler" so I can play anything I want in spite of all these damned restrictions...In the meanwhile I'm having much fun playing with my new DVD-R recorder. take care, YankAL
shareThere are many reasons why there are different codes on DVDs in different countries. One is so that each country can control exactly what is released on a DVD in their respective (in this case, possibly disrespective) countries. Secondly, DVD sales are a great, if not infallible fabrication of a Capitalistic mind, so any and every way they can, the makers of such try to get our dough from us, including restoring films, adding scenes, trickery with the official times, and those dreaded DVD Bonus Features, etc., etc. Lastly, there is the Pal / NTSC question, which is actually not a problem for any modern productions which are all digital, but still a factor with any analog productions which all of these old Hitchcock films are. There are possibly other reasons, as well, but those are the main three. OK? FuturePrimitive666.
"*bleep* it all and *bleep*ing no regrets!"
I just watched it free @ http://www.archive.org/details/TheRing and it ran just shy of 90 mins.
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