3 out of 5

Directed by: Alfred Hitchcock

It’s genteel Old Money versus take-it-all New Money in The Skin Game, Hitchcock’s and Alma Reville’s talkie adaptation of the play / silent movie from the early 20s.

…There’s more nuance there, though, which seems mostly ported over directly from the post-WWI-era source material, giving voice (via characters) to both an ask for compromise between the monied interests, as well as representing the growing presence of a middle class. And this all is delivered in one of Hitch’s most consistent films from his first few talkies, primarily because he kind of plays it straight. There are a couple of visual flourishes with careful zooms and use of off-screen / overlapping conversations, and he gets his comedic kicks with an energetic and silly – but also tense! – auction sequence, but the film is done sans a lot of gimmickry, which allows for more attention to the actors, and the script, both of which carry things well: lead patriarchs Patrick Hilchrist (C. V. France) and Mr. Hornblower (Edmund Gwenn) do the ol’ fuddy-duddy vs. fast-talker routine perfectly, while also dotting their performances with intelligence and humanity; the scheming Mrs. Hilchrist (Helen Haye) could’ve been just the one note evil matron, but, similarly, Haye gives her some more dimension. The children of the parents – and the dutiful-to-the-Hilchrists but impulsive Dawker (Edward Chapman) have to fill in moreso as the somewhat single-attribute representations mentioned above, but Chapman and the younger Hilchrist, Jill (Jill Esmond) are easy to watch onscreen; that is: even the more thinly defined characters rarely come across as just cutouts for a plotpoint.

The movie ultimately doesn’t reach for very much, though: like many dramadies from this era, the point is layed out pretty cleanly at the start – the back-and-forth landbuying between The Hilchrists and The Hornblowers, however framed, can only end in tragedy, and we’re clued in to exactly what this tragedy will likely be well before the film’s end. So the point is the point, and the movie doesn’t necessarily try to add to that so much as illustrate, over 90 minutes, that point. It’s very worthwhile (especially from a modern standpoint) that a post-war sentiment was essentially asking for understanding and compromise between oppositions; though, again, the movie’s not really suggesting how we could get there, so much as stating that that should be our goal.