The Square Ring – 1953 | 83mins | Drama, Sport | B&W

Plot Synopsis

One of the last of Ealing’s films to look at an institution through the characters involved in its function, was Basil Dearden‘s The Square Ring, which dealt with the events of an evening at a provincial boxing stadium, with a cross-section of the people found there. It had originally been a play, but its transition to the screen, with a screenplay by Robert Westerby, worked well, in spite of a plethora of characters and detail, and a rich cast which included Jack Warner as a stalwart trainer, Maxwell Reed, Ronald Lewis, Robert Beatty, Bill Owen and George Rose as a motley assemblage of fighters ranging from the neophyte to the punch-drunk has been, and even Joan Collins and Kay Kendall as ringside women. The Square Ring was a story with serious overtones and a tragic outcome, the Ealing film has a folksy jollity with lots of by-play and heavily worked gaglines (two cast members are even billed as First and Second Wiseacres).

The bouts themselves were shot with far less blood and gore than the American equivalents and, although Dearden was to make them reasonably dramatic, particularly the climactic encounter between Kid Curtis (Robert Beatty) and Barney Deakon (Alf Hines), there is nothing to equal the bravura camerawork of the American film, Body and Soul, in which a handheld Arriflex was used in the ring itself, and which influenced the greatest boxing film of the Eighties, Martin Scorsese’s Raging Bull. Nevertheless, The Square Ring is one of Dearden’s better pictures, keeping a straightforward dramatic unity, presenting the professional boxing world convincingly, its seedy, ugly side prominently on view but not overstated. The boxers themselves come across as rounded characters, not stereotypes, and there is a note of genuine suspense in the closing fight sequence.

Extract© George Perry: Forever Ealing.