Hitchcock's Textured Characters in The Skin Game

The Skin Game, a 1931 British International Picture release directed by Alfred Hitchcock, adapts a social realist play of the Edwardian novelist and playwright John Galsworthy, a luminous star in young Hitchcock's literary universe.¹ However, the producers highlighted Galsworthy's prominence in the adaptation. The title card, "A Talking Film by John Galsworthy," both advertises this deference and calls attention to theatrically long dialogue scenes rather than Hitchcock's camera work and montage. Hitchcock scholars have largely, but not completely, ignored or criticized this early sound film.² The purpose of my essay is to go beyond the detailed and sympathetic analysis of the film by Maurice Yacowar, and to consider how Hitchcock not only modified but transformed the play-bound screenplay.³ Close attention to several scenes highlights the cinematic techniques he used to enhance the play's characterizations in a way that deepens their emotional and even psychological textures. In short, the director developed a sexual subtext, initiating a new "skin game" within Galsworthy's skin-game conflict of social class competition.⁴

The action of both the play and the film is organized into three acts. My analysis is also structured in three parts. Each section addresses specific topics of characterization that are to a greater degree developed in a single act, and explores how events there reveal parallels in the interpersonal dynamics of the two families that are on other levels presented as contrasting. Part One, "Themes of Nurturance and Threats in Parent-Child Relationships," focuses on sequences that are central to Act 1 and also a short scene in Act 3, sections showing two men in their varying roles as the father of a daughter but also as subject to the lingering effects of childhood events and issues. Squire Hillcrist (C.V. France) responds to the knowledge that Mr. Hornblower (Edmund Gwenn) intends to buy and locate factories at the neighboring Centry acreage. The verbal and visual symbolism suggests the reopening of a repressed trauma along the lines of a Freudian primal scene. Hillcrist's turn to his daughter Jill (Jill Esmond) to discuss his feelings proves multi-layered, and is later paralleled by the relationship of Hornblower and his daughter-in-law, Chloe (Phyllis Konstam). In each instance, the father figure finds comfort in the daughter figure, whether because of his emotional distance from his wife (Hillcrist) or because he is a widower (Hornblower).

Part Two, "Identity Ambiguities and Slave Action Metaphors in the Auction Scene," examines the film's Act 2 auction scene, a set piece that Hitchcock shot so inventively and effectively that it was shown at a meeting of the London Film Society as an example of exemplary cinematic construction. As the auction develops, Chloe undergoes an emotional trauma, one that, as in the Hillcrist sequence in the first act, invites a psychoanalytic approach on the part of the spectator. An underlying motif here is that Jill exhibits a budding, same-sex attraction to Chloe. Additionally, Hitchcock's set up resonates with symbolism developed in late nineteenth-century Orientalist painting. The salacious image of the Roman slave sale of a young woman as a kind of literalization of the film's title offers an analogue for the eroticism that emerges throughout the auction: the result is that the parcel for sale becomes blurred with the body of the distraught Chloe.

Part Three, "Hitchcock's Final Touches: The Ending of The Skin Game," focuses on events at the Hornblower and Hillcrist houses in Act 3, and analyzes the concluding portrayal of three figures: Chloe, Jill, and Hillcrist. Chloe, shifting from passive victim to active schemer, fabricates both the story of her pregnancy and its termination to help secure her status in the Hornblower family. Jill takes action to address her family needs by taking the hand of Rolf (Frank Lawton), Hornblower's unmarried son; sadly, it appears that her internalized sense of duty to marry him, an act intended to ease the two-family conflict, implies that she will now sacrifice her new sexual identity. Finally, the figure of Hillcrist becomes the...