The Skin Game: Vintage Hitchcock

The Skin Game (1931)

Alfred Hitchcock is recognized as one of the great directors of motion pictures mainly based on his sterling studio work with Hollywood of the 50s and 60s. What you might not know is Hitchcock has a vast oeuvre that preceded this Hollywood work, made in his native Britain over about 20 or 30 years, beginning in the silent era and before he was brought to Hollywood by David O. Selznick.

I have been sampling some of these early Hitchcock offerings and have found there are some I like better than others, but all are worth watching. This refers to the talkies - I don't really like to watch the silents except on rare occasions.

The Skin Game is a marvelous little morality play that illustrates the friction between the British social classes and why that system was badly frayed and about to snap altogether.

The story is by John Galsworthy and concerns a nouveau riche manufacturer (Edmund Gwenn) who buys an ancient 200 acre wood from the local impoverished noble (CV France). Once the noble realizes the manufacturer wants the land to build a factory and cottages for his workers he wants to get it back and when he is unsuccessful he resorts to all sorts of skullduggery to get it.

As the pace accelerates, the feud gets ever wider, encompassing all family members on both sides. The denouement comes when an entirely innocent party is caught in the purposes of the two opponents and is destroyed to everybody's regret.

Despite the fact that it is an early talkie Hitchcock is quite effective at getting an interesting point across and keeping the viewers attention. I was fascinated by the blue blood's belief that everything should remain just the same as it always had, in other words to his advantage, based on some supposed heroism of an ancestor five hundred years before and based on absolutely no merits he had exhibited himself.

The industrialist showed a marvelous vitality and pluck and really had my sympathies but it was interesting how Hitchcock used the camera and dialog to get you to question your sympathies as the film progressed. Watch the auction scene for an example of Hitchcock's deft use of the camera and his visual shorthand. There are some of Hitchcock's distinctive playful black comedic moments, as well.

Those who like classic cars will enjoy seeing the ancient automobiles in all their splendid crudity, backfires and all.

The Skin Game is available on DVDs released by public domain publishers like Alpha and on collected works DVD sets. The movie is black and white and runs 77 minutes with a bit of deterioration on the sound, but pretty decently preserved overall, considering its age. This is an important film that shows Hitchcock could handle a dark dramatic storyline that did not revolve around murder.