30s Hitch: The Skin Game (1931)
To get the negatives out of the way; it is stagey, the acting varies to the point where the line readings just sound peculiar, though this may be a result of sound design, and the performances are sometimes clunky in the main. All of this makes it difficult to connect with the film (as much as in Juno, for that matter).
That said, what Hitch is doing visually and sonically, is worth a look and for all that the performances feel now stiff and rigid, now relatively fluid, and then again, just plain stolid, the underlying themes of the James Galsworthy play the movie is adapted from (by Hitchcock) are compelling and stand as a corrective to, say, the Downton Abbeyfication of dramatizing class in inter-World War Britain.
The film opens on Rolf Hornblower in a convertible sedan and Jill Hillcrist exchange less than pleasant pleasantries. His father has bought property that Jill's father sold him and he aims to develop it for his ceramics factories, dislocating the tenants and destroying the countryside to do so, in the name of progress. Jill objects because of the heartlessness and disregard for the place; Rolf advocates for his father by saying that his dad is actually rather clever and since his mother died, Hornblower pere has been looking for a new project.
We cut to the scene where Hornblower is in the process of serving notice to the Jackmans, two of the tenants on his land. The discussion is rife with victim-shaming, and of course, the reneging on the provision that Hornblower promised he would not evict tenants on his newly acquired land.
The Jackmans proceed to pay a visit to Mr. Hillcrist who is disturbed and affronted by Hornblower's move. He tells them not to worry and soon enough, we are introduced to Mr. Hornblower, a dynamic Edmund Gwenn bringing as much naturalism and shade as he can to the proceedings. C.V. France's Hillcrest is, of course, in this scene, morally upright and speaking up for nature and the working class; but Gwenn's Hornblower pokes at the propriety as old-fashioned and sentimental. The characters are a study in contrast but so, too, are the approaches the actors take. It would be a mistake to call Gwenn hammy in this and subsequent acts. France, by comparison comes off as wooden, if righteous.
Already, though, Hitchcock has made some interesting formalistic choices. When we see Jill cantering away from her meeting with Rolf, she is entering a vast treelined boulevard (the artificiality of the rear projection used actually renders it rather post-modern) while we see Rolf pulling up to his family's manse overlayed on top of Jill's progress. Additionally, the sound design is live; there is no looping in post here. Not that Hitchcock didn't use people talking over each other during live recording, but here, he takes a chance on emphasizing ambient and environmental sounds and noise to perhaps, underscore or emphasize the conflicts arising and growing more as the stakes get higher over the course of the film.
There's a montage in a sequence where, on the way to the town, there is a flurry of cross-cuts between Hornblower's car and a herd of sheep. The horn honks, and a sign for "Hornblower Pottery" is interspersed in intervals up to the meeting of the driver and the shepherd and the driver and Hornblower's dismissal of the shepherd. Indeed, the amount of cuts used in the first few minutes of the film is staggering.
What I find interesting in the earlier part of the film is how much movement there is in establishing the characters and the driving conflict of the narrative. Eventually, the film will settle into a less frenetic rhythm with long shots and some fairly uncomfortable close-ups.
For instance, the sequence where Hornblower and Mr. and Mrs. Hillcrist have it out over Hornblower's breach of agreement begins with a full shot of the study. Typically, this sort of thing only reinforces the stage origins of a film, but it also establishes the world the Hillcrists inhabit.
Things escalate between Hornblower and Hillcrist with the older man refusing to accept the younger's offer of neighborliness. Gwenn and France (and Helen Haye as Mrs. Hillcrist) are at this point, still more types than people, but the themes of ruinous capitalism coming for the bucolic life of the aristocracy sets up the overarching theme of the play/movie.
Hornblower is a "self-made man" bent on modernizing the area and moving on with his projects. If tenants have to be put out, it's all in the name of progress. The Hillcrists, of course, are the representatives of a dying world; the years after World War I heralded vast social change and the peerages were no longer insulated from societal shifts. Is Hornblower a pushy vulgarian? He seems so. Are the Hillcrists models of propriety and the old order? Yep. However, they also seem to want to ensure fairness for the people who live on what was once their land and after all, a promise is a promise.
By the way, Hillcrist refers to Hornblower's tactics of deceit as a "skin game" which Hillcrist seems to like. The term, it seems, originated during the American Civil War. Shortly, Jill returns to join her father in commiserating over the Hornblower's aggressive acquisition of the land around them. We are also introduced to Dawker, who seems to be an aide de camp of the Hillcrists, though particularly of Mrs. Hillcrist who seems to be the more Machiavellian of the the two elder Hillcrists. Jill does not care for Dawker and says as much when he and her mother disappear to another room to discuss a business matter.
It should be noted that while Jill has an emphatic dislike toward Mr. Hornblower, his son Charlie - while not behind his father's plans - does stand up for him and throughout the movie, keeps asking Jill if they can be friends. Neither Jill Esmond or Frank Lawton bring much to woefully barely sketched-out characters, but I give Esmond credit for trying. You get the feeling that she knows there just isn't that much to the role, but she gamily attempts to make Jill somewhat more than an insipid "daddy's girl".
The next strategy in Hillcrist playbook is to by The Sentry, an extensive lot of unspoiled land that Hornblower has his eyes on and once he's purchased, will close the circle around the Hillcrist's properties. At the auction, there is a cacophony of overlapping voices, car noises, and pandemonium that would have been more effective instead of less annoying, had the sound been recorded at a lower bias. Be that as it may, in a series of back and forth cuts, we see the Hillcrists - well, Mrs. Hillcrist and Mr. Hillcrist - visibly snub Chloe, Mr. Hornblower's daughter-in-law, married to his other son. Jill looks back at her sympathetically and the Hornblower camp take umbrage as Hornblower says they'll pay for their highhanded haughtiness. Indeed, earlier Hornblower had called Mrs. Hornblower to task for her ignoring his daughter-in-law and their general snobbishness.
Chloe, played by Phyllis Konstam is an almost archetypal late twenties "fallen woman" or "woman with a past". It's an easy, transparent read, but I give Konstam credit; her work here is subtler than many saddled with similar roles. Of course, given the heights melodramas were known for during the period, I best use a sliding scale on that.
The auction begins and Dawker is situated as the agent for submitting the Hillcrist bids. Before the bidding begins, Chloe attempts to draw Mrs. Hillcrist out a little and offers her friendship is quickly rebuffed. Jill continues to be sympathetic and notices at one point, that Chloe is disturbed by a man staring at her. It's at this moment that Hitchcock brings in another technique for shifting point-of-view from external action to the interior, subjective struggle of a character. In a series of repeated zooms of the man's face (in slightly higher contrast) coming toward Chloe, she succumbs to a faint as Charlie and Jill - who's nabbed smelling salts from her mother - tend to her.
That sets up yet another sub-plot that will lend more meaning to the term "skin game." For now, we end the bidding war in Hornblower's favor when the last bid comes out of nowhere. Hillcrist believes it to be a third party, but it turns out that it's Hornblower's agent, taking advantage of Hillcrist's belief. It's a cunning move and one that sets up the next move on Mrs. Hillcrist and Dawker's parts.
We learn a couple of things about Chloe. One, she's expecting a child - which makes her husband Charlie, Hornblower's other son (a fairly engaging John Longden) very happy, and two, that past I mentioned? By our standards, I don't think it would cause an eye to blink, but for the well-heeled of Great Britain ninety something years ago? It's what they would no doubt call - in our terms - "not a good look".
Chloe, it seems, operated as a party to sting operations, acting as "the other woman" in divorce set-ups to provide proof of philandering. She had been left impoverished by circumstances otherwise. That Dawker has been investigating her and rounded up witnesses for Mrs. Hillcrist becomes clear when she sends a note to Mr. Hornblower to come meet her. In the meantime, Chloe has gone to call on Mr. Hillcrist and Jill to beg them to say nothing to Charlie and even put a positive spin on her past. Both father and daughter are willing to do so; but at the same time, Mrs. Hillcrist has laid her cards on the table and brought Hornblower to a standstill. Her terms are that the Hillcrists buy the Sentry property back for what it was originally bid on (4500 pounds against the 9500 Hornblower paid). Hornblower has both Mrs. Hillcrist and Dawker swear on a Bible that they will keep Chloe's past a secret.
As it happens, though, we've learned that latterly, gossip was already spreading among the village and Charlie had forced Dawker to confirm the rumors. So much for the insurance of swearing on a bible.
Charlie calls on Hornblower and Jill and they do their best to deny the rumors abounding, but Charlie already knows the truth. Chloe had been hiding behind the curtains in the study when Charlie arrived and hears his denunciation of her. When he asks where she is, Jill parts the curtains, but there is no Chloe. A quick search ensues while the elder Hillcrists, Dawker, and Hornblower have it out over the deed to the Sentry and the rotten tactics the Hillcrists used to bring us to this moment.
It's a gutting scene when Charlie brings Chloe's lifeless body in and Hornblower goes off on the Hillcrists in a fit. They destroyed his son's happiness and killed both his daughter-in-law and his grandchild. More than anything else in the film, Gwenn's words land with tremendous weight. Hillcrist, whose ignorance of what his wife was doing doesn't entirely exonerate him, offers what we feel is a sincere regret-filled apology, but Hornblower won't have it and his last word to Hillcrist is "hypocrite."
Charlie, Jill, Dawker, and Hornblower exit the scene to leave both senior Hillcrists to sit with the results of their schemes. Earlier, Mrs. Hillcrists had sent word to the Jackmans that they don't need to move and can stay. They now enter to thank their benefactors who gaze at them, stunned from the events that the Jackmans have no knowledge of. Unresponsive to the repeated "thank you"s, after the Jackmans exit, Mr. Hillcrist says that he'd forgotten about them.
The film ends with a shot of a tree being cut down by a chain saw.
This is one of those odd films where the construction of the film itself seems to be struggling against the source material. I know that Hitchcock has essentially dismissed his Elstree work as work for hire, but even so, I think he must have set himself some goals to hit in each one, perhaps as a way of keeping himself interested in the material, but it is also my understanding that he genuinely cared about the sources, particularly in Sean O'Casey's case (they had agreed to work together after Juno) and I believe Galsworthy, whose work did speak to Hitchcock.
There are a number of elements in The Skin Game that seem to show that there's more than meets the eye. Not enough work has been done on Alfred Hitchcock's take on class and social divides. He rarely spoke directly about any social or political subject, though we can read his work through social and political lenses and come away with the impression that he had a fairly clear eye of those divisions.
A case could be made that he was - during his years in England, at least - more likely to support the working classes. I think this could be extended to throughout his career since many of the plots center on middle-class males and occasionally women, caught up in situations far larger than they realized. His choice of non-thriller/suspense material reflects this, as well.
In The Skin Game, the sense that I have is that he's on the side of the Jackmans and even Jill and Rolf in their quests to see a different world or way of being that doesn't involve the approach to "progress" that his father employs. Mostly, though, in these early works, the choice of material speaks to larger social issues and tensions that drive the circumstances in which the characters find themselves and the hubris that overtakes them when they begin scheming, particularly under the delusion initially held that they are doing something noble. As we see too plainly, the Hillcrists lose control and wreak devastation beyond what they could have possibly foretold and it's this that provides another clue to Hitchcock's philosophy and/or Catholic influences.
The hubris that they're better than Hornblower sets the Hillcrists on a downward path. We are led to believe, initially, that the Hillcrists cared about the land and the people on it. Over the course of the film, it becomes clear that it is more of a matter of preserving their unblemished views and particularly, their way of life. This is their right as members of the upper class, and they will fight as dirty as they accuse Hornblower of fighting with deadlier results. Yes, Hornblower represents much, if not all, that the Hillcrists revile and fear. No, he's not a role model nor a glowing endorsement of capitalism. All of this fits in with Hitchcock's lifelong themes, I believe.
His Catholicism, as I've mentioned before and likely will again, is evident in this very thing; that when men think themselves deities, they are in critical danger of a fall. The Fall repeats itself throughout Hitch's career. Redemption is rarely experienced and when it is, you get the feeling that once "The End" has appeared and faded, those characters will find themselves plunged back into a fallen world once again.
Additionally, the innocents like Jill and Rolf and even Charlie are all tainted with the sins of the fathers (or the mother in Jill's case; Galsworthy/Hitchcock continue to render Mr. Hillcrist a man who doesn't care for duplicity and feels it impossible to hate). Dawker comes across, to some degree, as Hitchcock's surrogate; he's well aware of the dirt and blemishes of earthly existence. Of course, Dawker seems to relish his involvement in this world and one can't help but feel that the director simply sees these characters all revolving around in a Dantean spiral.
My understanding of Hitchcock is that he is one of cinema's great fatalists. Unlike Scorsese, an equally Catholic filmmaker, I don't believe Hitch set much store in the argument of man's free will as a blessing. I suspect, if anything, that the most positive spin you can put on a Hitchcock film is that the heroes and heroines winning out over immense odds owes more to grace than aught else.
This may not the case with these earlier works; there is an impending sense of cyclic, repeating purgatorial doom over them. Murder!, of these early thirties works, might make the case that the thriller/suspense genre offered Hitchcock a "sunnier" cinematic perspective from a narrative point of view, anyway, if not a philosophic one.
With The Skin Game, the switch from oppressor to victim in the Hornblower family is a disturbing example of how righteousness is a flip of the script over to prejudice and worse. Chole becomes, possibly, though I may be forcing too much of this type of reading, the martyr figure; indeed, when she is called in by Hornblower to refute Mrs. Hillcrist and Dawker's claims and proofs (they bring in a few men who had "worked" with her), her humiliation is nearly total and almost palpable. She was known by a different name in those days and the last man who is brought forward might be, if not her ex-husband, obviously someone who knew her as such and is filmed in extreme close-up before cutting back to Chloe filmed in a mid-shot as other characters pass between her and the camera and then zooms out to leave her stunned and alone though there are others in frame.
As creaky as much of the film is, I think it deserves a second look. Mordaunt Hall's contemporary review(3) does point out that the movie saps the play of its power and I wouldn't disagree; but I'd also add that it does pull out something pretty potent at the end.
Gallery
Once again, Jack E. Cox is set to the task of visualizing Hitch's vision, as he would do for most of the 30s. His partnership with Hitchcock goes back to at least 1927 with The Ring.
There's a paucity of information about Cox, but i can't up help but wonder if he was simply more of the cameraman for the director. It is my impression that throughout Hitchcock's career, the visual choices were almost all his. That said, Cox's work is very often quite good and sometimes exceptional.
These are the two shots early in the movie. Click on both to enlarge (click on one and this should generate a slideshow.) I do recommend examining these up close. The artificiality of the back production in the photo of Jill heading down the lane seems almost post-modern as it serves to emphasize the fact that we are watching a fiction, a fabrication that reinforces the text itself and provides a kind of frame or bracket for the next scene which is actually layered on top of this one.
Hornblower (Edmund Gwenn) confronts Mrs. Hillcrist (Helen Haye). I wish I could have found a still later in this sequence as the backlighting of the rays coming through the window is both extremely pretty but also raises the question of import; both figures are backlit and remain shades, Dawker enters the scene later and all three are dark as specters. This is a conflict that plays out in the shadows but a harsh light is about to bring ruin on all parties concerned.
As talky as this film is - and it is - at a a certain point, the images carry the drama along more securely. The performances are variable (with the exception of Gwenn who anchors each scene he's in) but by the end of the film, the enormity of what the Hillcrist's victory cost, the loss to the Horblowers, and the return to the status quo in the Hillcrists seeming uncomprehension at the return of the Jackmans only serve to underscore the final scene of the tree being cut down, an image laden with the weight of what should have been more at the front of the film.
Chloe going behind the curtain to avoid Charlie's denunciation looks like a Fusilli painting.
It's really the shots that lead up to this moment that I wish I could include, as well. The parade of Chloe's marks up to the close up of the last man accentuate a claustrophobia that Hitchcock would put to better use elsewhere. Even so, both Chloe and Hornblower are like two damned souls cast into Limbo.
Inevitably, Chloe's body is found in the pond. The richness of the darks and the values in the print that I saw were exceptional.
Notes and sources
1. "F.T. The following picture, The Skin Game, was also based on a stage play, I believe.I don't remember it too clearly. It's the story of a fierce rivalry between a landowner and his immediate neighbor, who had made his money in business. The most important scene showed them vying with each other at an auction sale.
A.H. It was taken from the play by John Galsworthy. Edmund Gwenn, who was very famous in London at the time, starred in it. I didn't make it by choice, and there isn't much to be said about it."
Truffaut, Francois with Scott, Helen G.. Hitchcock-Truffaut. Simon and Shuster Touchstone. New York. 1985. p.77
2. "The exceptional quality of Murder!, the considerable progress it revealed, and its more than respectable commercial success make it difficult to understand why Hitchcock next agreed to do a film based on John Galsworthy's play The Skin Game (1931). The only apparent reason would seem to be that Galsworthy's considerable literary reputation would provide Hitchcock with an opportunity to demonstrate the magnitude of his ambition. The play was bad and already dated, but perhaps Hitchcock thought - he could “make something-of it." If this was the case, he was soon brought down a peg, because The Skin Game is the worst film he has ever put his name to---a botched job in which the auteur seemed totally uninterested. There is no trace of stylization in the acting or of precision in the direction. On several occasions the movements of the actors, who are obviously doing whatever comes into their heads, catch the cameraman unprepared. As a result, we see either the beginnings of a camera movement that quickly comes to a halt, or the character stepping out of the frame while the camera wildly searches around for him in a sudden panic. It seems unlikely that this is a stylistic effect, especially since the film is completely devoid of all style."
Rohmer, Eric and Chabrol, Claude. Hitchcock - The First Forty-Four Films. Frederick Ungar Publishing. New York. 1979. p. 30
3. Hall, Mordaunt. "THE SCREEN; A College Romance. A Galsworthy Play. Fashionable Flirtations. A German Musical Film. Teutonic Fun." The New York Times. June 20, 1931. https://www.nytimes.com/1931/06/20/archives/the-screen-a-college-romance-a-galsworthy-play-fashionable.html
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