The Skin Game

There’s early Hitchcock, and there’s EARLY Hitchcock. Early Hitchcock — he of Sabotage, The 39 Steps, and The Man Who Knew Too Much (first version) — was all about espionage thrillers, mysteries, and wrong-place-wrong-time stories. But EARLY Hitchcock is a whole different kettle of fish. He has comedies. Biopics. Musicals, even! And he has The Skin Game. A flabby, languid melodrama, adapted from a stage play, about two rich families warring over the use of a piece of farmland. One family is old money, and wants to preserve the land for tenancy by people who’ve lived there for decades. The new money wants to develop it. Even for someone like me, who loathes overlaying modern politics onto films from before modern times, this movie is a hard swallow. Two clans of one percenters squabbling over land rights is hardly the most riveting concept. Having the story treat the lower class folk who live in the house as an afterthought — and have them virtually prostrate to the old money family for being so “generous” — it feels gross. It may be how society worked back then, but the way it forgets they exist (a character even says it at the end) in favor of these families trying to out-flank one another feels wrong. And by the end, when both families have done horrible things, ruined lives, and the final shot hits … it taints the whole viewing experience. But if you can make yourself view it for what it is and not through a modern lens, it’s still just a dull movie. It’s an exceptionally verbose movie; almost every element of the plot is relayed through dialogue. There’s no action whatsoever to break up the constant talking. Add onto that a visual palate that is the definition of perfunctory. I wasn’t expecting something exciting like the plane chase in North By Northwest or anything, and I know this is a very early movie in his canon, but man, is this ever boring to look at. There’s maybe three shots that aren’t indoors? And I’ll give credit to the two long, unbroken shots in the movie, one the first meeting of the two patriarchs, and the other in the auction (even if the auction scene as a whole eats up way too much runtime). The actors try as much they can to inject some life into the proceedings, but there’s only so much they can do with a movie that vomits a dictionary at you non-stop for almost 90 minutes. There’s nothing that makes this movie outright bad or unwatchable. I know Hitch disowned it, and while I don’t think it’s “scrub it from his repertoire” levels of failure, it’s definitely on the bottom end. It’s a passable family drama if you’re into that thing, or if you’re trying to see his entire filmography like me. But if you watch this hoping for a hidden gem, you’re going to come away disappointed.