Hitchcock's 'The Skin Game' Review

Without being told beforehand, I don't think anybody would guess that The Skin Game was directed by Alfred Hitchcock. The film, released in 1931, tells the fairly monotonous story of the war between two families, one being traditional and the other being a modern threat to their way of living. The film and its characters are well-rounded, and there are moments of tension and excitement, however the film in itself seems to present the story at a steady pace, with the ending feeling out of place and abrupt.
Plot points aside, I think the film shows great progress in the career of Hitchcock, who had directed his first feature less than a decade before. With experimentation in camerawork and editing, Hitchcock definitely shows in his direction of this film that he was out to push the boundaries of cinema and create what had not been created before, it just seems that this film was not quite the film that was going to prove that to the public.

One of the biggest forms of experimentation in this film comes from the editing and camera work. With whip pans being used in the exciting auction scene in order to reflect the sudden changes in the bidding war, Hitchcock shows that he was a master of controlling the emotions that a camera could make an audience feel. This fast paced scene, featuring a skilled hand in camera work, was definitely one of the ones that I found most enjoyable. In the same scene, a little before the auctioning has started, Hitchcock shows his editing skills, with the superimposition of a face hauntingly moving towards the camera numerous times, showing the audience how fearful of this man the young girl is.

In context of the time and the extent that cinema had been pushed before, this film stands its ground with other films released at the time. The film has excitement, plotting, deception and death, some of these themes Hitchcock went on to master in his later career, and as expected, these scenes are the ones that stand out in this film. Hitchcock himself has said that he did not make this film by choice, an adaptation of an averagely written stage play, the film is character based and slightly mundane at parts, something that Hitch's later films were rarely ever called. It appears to me, that in the time of advancement from silent films to talkies, Hitchcock wanted to perfect the art of the talkie before he made his big break-through with it. It seems that this film, along with a few others (that will remain unnamed in this post) were merely a practice for Hitchcock to see what worked and what didn't, and what didn't quite work in this film was the sound.

Considering the first feature 'talkie' film was released only four years before The Skin Game, we have to respect that the technology was not brilliant at the time of the film's production. The fact that Hitch manages to seamlessly construct both the sound and picture of the film gives him a lot of respect in my eyes, however there are parts of the film where the audio is not perfect, perhaps some actor's voices were not suited to this new advancement of technology, as there are some character's whose lines are barely audible, and some whose are perfectly clear. The fact of the matter is, the story is told, and Hitchcock, having managed to master silent films in his short space of working in the industry before talkies were introduced, uses a lot of the features common in silents to tell the story, such as the vision of the factories superimposed over the cottage.

The film is not one to watch if you are looking for the most exciting of Hitchcock's work, however it is a really beautiful watch when one enjoys looking at a director's advancement and learning process. The film is just over an hour long, not long enough to become dragged-out and to lose a modern audiences attention span, and the strength of the play that the film is based of has enough intrigue and twists to keep you hanging on for the whole hour.