The Skin Game (1931, Alfred Hitchcock) (Patreon)

46/100

Hitch's fourth talkie, but he still seems to wish he were making a silent picture. That's most evident early on, before the plot kicks in: He finds a gorgeous tree-canopied path for Jill to ride her horse down, establishes the village with a montage (admittedly a cacophonous one, but you don't need the sound, strictly speaking—it plays like Eisenstein) of dogs barking and people shouting and hands urgently pressing car horns. After about six minutes, though, Galsworthy's play almost literally takes center stage, at which point Hitchcock clearly loses all formal interest and just starts training the camera at the actors, with occasional small pans to keep them in frame. (Bizarrely, one such pan appears to seek out an actor who isn't actually there. Someone turns and refers to someone else, and the camera dutifully looks in that direction, as if anticipating an entrance. But there isn't one; the reference was to a character who's absent. So the camera immediately pans back, having achieved nothing save to confuse the viewer. Really surprised that take was used.) It's a decent text, prone to stating its concerns too plainly but also admirably reluctant to take either side in the ugly class war it orchestrates; both families come across as somewhat justified in their respective underhanded schemes (the Hillcrists genuinely care about the displaced tenants, but they also treat the Hornblowers—love these names!—like roadkill), yet it's difficult to root for either one's victory. Only during the lengthy auction sequence, though, does Skin Game work as a movie, rather than merely as a record of one strong performance (Edmund Gwenn gives excellent bluster as the nouveau riche entrepreneur) and a slew of others that are badly overheated . Nobody ever pays this title much attention (even Hitchcock/Truffaut zips right past it), and with good reason.