Skin Game, The

2253. THE SKIN GAME (1931 -England). With EDMUND CWENN, JILL ESMOND. Directed by ALFRED HITCHCOCK, from the play by JOHN GALSWORTHY. “What is it that gets loose when you start a fight?” Genteel Squire Hillcrist ponders that very question after his family and the neighboring Homblower clan wage a property war against each other in a rural English setting. Mr. Homblower is an industrialist, “a man with no past, just the future.” He is buying up the pastoral lands with the intenÂtion of cutting down the trees and displacing the tenants in order to build extensions to the family potÂtery works. Horrified by the image of sooty factory chimneys surrounding their ancestral home, Squire Hillcrist and his relatives go up against the Hornblowers in a bidding war over a key piece of farmland which borders the Hillcrist estate. In the heat of the conflict, a damaging scandal about Mr. Hornblower’s daughter-in-law comes to light, it is a secret so grim as to ruin the young woman’s life. Will the noble and principled HillcristÕs stoop so low as to use this scandal in order to save their land? Alfred Hitchcock, master of suspense, transforms Galsworthy’s taut stage drama into a tension-packed film. His uses of moving camera, montage and imaginative sound cutting are innovative and add to the non-stop dramatic excitement. 82 minutes. Hitchcock