Worldwide Web Premier: Watch Alfred Hitchcock’s The Ring Live this Friday

This is not a production still. It's an actual frame from the movie. Yeah, the quality is that sharp.

Read on and keep this hashtag in mind: #thering

This, my friends, is what the Web, at its best, is all about. The world premier of Alfred Hitchcock’s 1927 masterpiece, The Ring, will take place, not just in a single theater inaccessible to 90% of the world’s Hitchcock fans, but online, available to the world. Here are the details:

Date: Friday, July 13th
Time: 20:00 GMT (12:00 Noon, US/Pacific)*
Where: http://thespace.org/items/e0000ecg
Cost: FREE
Twitter Hashtag: #thering

*Find out what time it starts in your time zone by doing the math here.

The premier follows the BFI National Archive’s meticulous frame-by-frame restoration of the film, with a newly-minted soundtrack composed and performed by award-winning jazz musician Soweto Kinch. So forget those cruddy old soundtrack loops you’ve gotten used to with silent films. Kinch’s music alone will be almost worth the price of admission.

But even more importantly, I watched a preview of the film and visuals are truly stunning.  You'll think the film had been shot last week. The quality's that good. Watching the restored The Ring is the closest you'll ever get to seeing what Hitchcock himself saw at the premier.

The Ring will be shown simultaneously at London’s Hackney Empire, so it’ll be almost like joining a live theater audience, but with one major improvement: unlike the theater-goers, you can follow along in a worldwide Twitter feed—just use the hashtag #thering. I’ll be there and I hope you can join us! To get prepped for the film, take a look at this brief-but-informative documentary about Hitch, London and the British film industry of the 1920s. 

As was the case throughout his career, in this early production, Hitch assembled a repertory cast that he would use off and on in multiple films. The movie's story itself goes a little something like this: The Ring is a story of the love-triangle between boxer Bob Corby (played by Ian Hunter, who also starred in Easy Virtue the following year), his sparring partner Jack Sander (Carl Brisson, featured the following year in The Manxman) and Jack’s beautiful wife Mabel (aka the housekeeper 1928's The Farmer's Wife). Even the setting was to become an early Hitchcock standby, with the climactic championship fight set in Albert Hall, a locale he would return to in both versions of The Man Who Knew Too Much.

See you there!