The Skin Game (1931) - film review

For centuries, the Hillcrists have ruled their own piece of rural England, but times are changing and money now counts for more than breeding.  They are appalled when one of their neighbours, a grubby self-made businessman named Hornblower, begins evicting long-standing tenants from cottages to provide homes for his pottery workers.  Things come to a head when Hornblower announces his decision to by an estate adjacent to the Hillcrists’ so that he can expand his business.  When Hornblower succeeds in getting the land by low cunning, the Hillcrists are furious, but Providence smiles on them.   They discover that Hornblower’s daughter-in-law has a dark secret, and intend to use this information to their advantage...

With its stagy compositions, long unbroken takes, limited camera movement and heavy reliance on dialogue, The Skin Game is almost the complete antithesis of the kind of film that Alfred Hitchcock had been making up until this point in his career.  The film is obviously an adaptation of a stage play – this one written by the popular British writer John Galsworthy, of Forsyte Sage fame – and Hitchcock directs it almost as though it were a stage production, with little of his usual flair and inventiveness.   

Hitchcock had adapted many stage plays prior to this, but he had always gone to great lengths to mask their theatrical origins, by using real locations wherever possible and by using the camera to tell the story rather than rely on pages of dialogue for exposition.   Viewed Today, The Skin Game is perhaps the most dated of the early Hitchcock films – partly because its subject (a stodgy melodrama about class warfare) is dated, partly because the performances are old-school theatrical, but mainly because it is stylistically bland.  It is reported that Hitchcock had, by this time, grown bored with adapting stage plays and this film certainly shows it.

There had been a previous adaptation of The Skin Game, released in 1921 and directed by B.E. Doxat-Pratt.  Two of the main players of this film, Edmund Gwenn and Helen Haye, reprised their roles in the Hitchcock version; they had also starred in the original London stage play.  Edmund Gwenn would appear in two further Hitchcock films, Foreign Correspondent (1940) and The Trouble with Harry (1955).

© James Travers 2008

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