REVIEW : "The Skin Game" (1931) - Movie by Alfred Hitchcock

The early talkies (the late 20's to early 30's) is generally a peculiar period in film history. Many silent actors, even huge stars, and famed director's, saw their career slowly but surely fading away as demand for words and not artistic expression, became the focus.

Even more peculiar is it, how ingeniously Hitchcock seemed to adapt to the new, improved, medium, without actually loosing his "silent" artistic touch. Even if a movie like this one, The Skin Game, was a box office success, the cinephiles in following decades, have all but dumped this, and the other very early attempts by Hitchcock to find his shelf in the talkies era, as merely a "downer" do-for period lacking "inspiration".

This is certainly to a large extend a misconception, and must rest in the fact that those critics probably have not even watched the movies in question. I will agree that the plots are not very interesting, which is an aspect that could be said of most Hitchcock movies, except for when they are direct tools for the suspense in itself.

At times the camerawork is awful and the placement and movement of the actors, painfully bad and helpless. At times you really feel like you are watching a rehearsal of a scene in a theatre, in stiff postures and mechanic delivery of lines. And off course it is the director's responsibility making sure this does not happen. I will give it though, that the recording of the sound probably placed huge limitations on movement and placement of the gear in general. I have never seen so many pans and use of long lenses in a Hitchcock movie as is seen in this one. Notice the auction scene, where Hitchcock really makes a virtue out af a necessity and places the camera in the eyes of the auctioneer, trying to catch the bids in the audience.

But if we deliberately pretend the dialogue driven scenes are not worth spending more time, there are a lot of other moments, that really shows the growing interest in how to tell emotional stories without using words while at the same time keeping with the artistic aspects wherever it is possible and befits the narrative.

It seems pretty clear to me that Hitchcock did not really care that much for the dialogue generally, it is an adaptation of a ten year old stage play anyway, and producer and company would probably prefer it this way anyway, to make sure that there was focus on talking and not "artsyness".

But nonetheless, Hitchcock manages to sneak in many little touches here which seems to be early echoes of hailed aspects of later movies. He know how to frame a face and let it express necessary emotion when it is much needed. I see obvious parallels between several gothic shots and closeups here and Rebecca from 1940.

And of course there are sequences that reek of sexuality. In my opinion, the second act is devoted to the "hooker" past of one of the two battling men (fathers)´s daughter in law. She arrives earlier at the auction and has an emotional "vision" of guilt presented as the angry head flying towards her in a distorted vision. A highly expressive, and to me quite surprising, out of the blue sequence. but a typical Hitchcock trick.

The daughter in law is, by all contemporary standards, almost naked in her thin, low cut, see through gown, that leaves it pretty much impossible for the supporting male actors to steer their gaze in any other direction than at her attractive cleavage.

I feel pretty confident that Hitchcock spend most of his energy in making sure this part of the movie was done the right way, since the quality of it stands in pretty stark contrast to some of the other expositional dialogue scenes elsewhere.

It seems the case that the development of the talkies mostly was an inhibition on creating decent movies at this time, as it took most of the steam out of the flow of the cinematography, with its stiffness. It goes to show the brilliance of Hitchcock that he still managed to deliver something worth studying all these years later. A great example is how he choreographed the suicide scene in the pool in the last part. Two scenes are actually glued together and shot all in focus as far as I can judge it (something that movies like Citizen Kane became famous for 10 years later) and how that gives it a broad scenic view to it that would fully form around Rear Window.

Studying Hitchcock is in a way an economic way of studying the history of film. Hitchcock was active from the early 20´s to the late seventies which can easily be settled as the coming of age era of cinema in a broader scope. If you are a true cinephile I urge you to give this a shot supplied you can find a decent copy :-)

6/11