Come review time it had been several weeks since I watched The Skin Game, and truth be told, I didn’t remember much. I was forced to take drastic measures. I rewatched it.
The story mostly follows the old money Hillcrist family making them seem like the protagonists, but they are not without fault. Had they been more welcoming to the upstart Hornblowers, the whole conflict might have been avoided.
The central conflict is very much old money verses new money, a la The Gilded Age, or the Slobs verses the Snobs, if you prefer. Skin game is slang for a shady business deal, what Mr. Hornblower is accused of. But it is less the deal and more the conflict that is at the center of the story. And skin game takes on another meaning entirely at the climax.
Alfred Hitchcock was a little heavy handed with visual imagery early in his career. The Hornblower son and Hillcrist daughter meet at the beginning, teasing a love interest. She, on a horse, he, in an unusually loud car. When they separate, she follows a picturesque treed path, he, towards a more urban area. This kind of visual reinforcement is throughout.
Quite unlike latter Hitchcock, there is some sloppy dialog. Actors start speaking at the wrong time and correct themselves. Other times it feels like they are entirely improvising their dialog. It doesn’t detract from the film, however. Early talkies are pretty clumsy in general. Looking back, Hitchcock said about it in his interview with Francois Truffaut "I didn't make it by choice, and there isn't much to be said about it."
The Skin Game holds up to a second viewing. It could have been a two dimensional moral tale, but chooses a more nuanced path. AMRU 3.5.
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