The Skin Game (Alfred Hitchcock, 1931)

Phyllis Konstam and Edward Chapman in The Skin Game

Mr. Hillcrist: C.V. France
Mrs. Hillcrist: Helen Haye
Jill Hillcrist: Jill Esmond
Mr. Hornblower: Edmund Gwenn
Charles Hornblower: John Longden
Chloe Hornblower: Phyllis Konstam
Rolf Hornblower: Frank Lawton
Dawker: Edward Chapman
Mr. Jackman: Herbert Ross
Mrs. Jackman: Dora Gregory
Auctioneer: Ronald Frankau

Director: Alfred Hitchcock
Screenplay: Alfred Hitchcock, Alma Reville
Based on a play by John Galsworthy
Cinematography: Jack E. Cox

Despite winning the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1932, John Galsworthy is one of those authors nobody reads much anymore, partly because his reputation was eclipsed by the great modernists like James Joyce and Virginia Woolf whom the Nobel committee overlooked. His series of novels that constitutes The Forsyte Saga came back in vogue for a while in 1967 and again in 2002 when they were adapted for British television, playing on that nostalgia for the good old days of the British class system that more recently made a hit of Downton Abbey. Class, especially the conflict of the landed aristocracy and the new-monied bourgeoisie, was his big theme, and he explored it not only in his novels but also in plays like The Skin Game, which was first performed in 1920 and immediately snapped up for a silent film adaptation. Hitchcock apparently saw the play and liked the idea of turning it into a talkie, wrote the screenplay with his wife, Alma, and even cast Edmund Gwenn and Helen Haye in the roles they had played in the silent film. The problem is that Galsworthy forbade any deviation from the original plot and dialogue, leaving Hitchcock for the most part stagebound. There's occasionally some interesting camerawork, especially in the auction scene in which swish pans are used to build suspense during the competitive bidding over the property that the old-money Hillcrist wants to keep out of the hands of the self-made industrialist Hornblower. But too often Hitchcock reverts to stage tableaus -- some of them badly blocked -- that show off the melodramatic hamming of some of the actors, as well as some stilted dialogue carried over from the play. There's a long take in which Chloe Hornblower confronts Hillcrist's scheming agent, Dawker, that particularly exposes Phyllis Konstam's mannered acting. The plot hinges on Chloe's dark secret, which seems much ado about nothing today: that she once worked as a professional co-respondent in divorce cases before marrying Hornblower's son, Charles. But Hitchcock retains Galsworthy's ambivalence about his characters, making neither Hillcrist not Hornblower purely admirable or villainous. We dislike Hornblower for his callous treatment of some old tenants of Hillcrist's after he buys property from the squire and for his willingness to despoil the land with his factories, but we also have to condemn Hillcrist's snobbery and his readiness to drag Chloe Hornblower's name through the mud. As he often did, Galsworthy put his faith in the younger generation, Hornblower's son Rolf and Hillcrist's daughter, Jill, who seem fated to bring both houses together, but Hitchcock doesn't quite give these characters room enough in the film version to make that point. He later told François Truffaut that he "didn't make [The Skin Game] by choice, and there isn't much to be said about it," but as so often, Hitchcock was fiddling with the truth. It's not one of his better films, hindered as he was by Galsworthy's restrictions, but there's some meat on it.