The MacGuffin: News and Comment (21/Apr/2012)
(c) Ken Mogg (2012)
Apr 21
Hitchcock's film of John Galsworthy's play, The Skin Game (1931) - there had been an earlier film version in 1920 - is a key work in the director's career. It ranks, in that respect, with Rope and the project We, the Accused (from the novel by Ernest Raymond), for all of these works are about the base side of human nature - and our blindness and hypocrisy concerning it. At the end of The Skin Game, the gentrified Hillcrist (C.V. France) tries to apologise for what has happened: 'With all my heart, I am sorry.' But his antagonist, the nouveau-riche industrialist Hornblower (Edmund Gwenn), angrily responds, 'Hypocrite!' - and we know what he means (if we have been following the film correctly, that is). Let me be clear. The Skin Game is a very misunderstood film, from early in Hitchcock's career, and is often dismissed as 'boring'. That is quite wrong. It has its weak points, definitely, but any true Hitchcockian should be capable of seeing its tremendous sympathy for society's victims, especially female ones: the erring past of Hornblower's daughter-in-law Chloe (Phyllis Konstam) and her present suffering bracket her with Laurita in Easy Virtue, Henrietta in Under Capricorn, and Marnie in Marnie, amongst others. (I also think of the 'half-caste' Handell Fane in Hitchcock's previous film Murder!) Hitchcock admired Galsworthy's plays for their even-handed presentation of social issues, and indeed that Nobel Prize-winning playwright and author was a good model for Hitchcock whose wife, Alma, would later describe him as 'the most objective of men'. (However, there's an amusing anecdote in the Truffaut book about how the Hitchcocks dined one evening with Mr and Mrs Galsworthy and found the conversation taking a stilted and rarefied turn. Pity!) The film could have been a masterpiece, and remains, as I say, misunderstood. It isn't just about base human nature, it is the expression, in effect, of the universal existence of such a nature. It shows the influence of the Symbolist artists and writers on Hitchcock, such that you should feel, as you watch the film, that its real meaning exists on a higher plane than usual. In 'A Companion to Alfred Hitchcock' (2011), I wrote: 'The enduring quality of Hitchcock's work owes much to its general allusiveness. This bears on the films' Symbolist aspect, discussed [separately], but the following illustration is instructive. Hitchcock often told interviewers of his wish to film twenty-four hours in the life of a city, beginning with the arrival at market of produce fresh from the country. The theme would be defilement, how civilization reduces good things to waste matter. This could be an analogy of war, or a picture of the human condition generally.' (p. 35) I do think that The Skin Game works like that, and is very moving. Its central scene of a land-auction, in which Hillcrist and Hornblower bid furiously against each other, and thereby show their true natures (Hillcrist in particular forgets his customary dignity), works like an analogy of the amoral Will (Schopenhauer's term) that governs existence, including the most mundane and everyday actions. 'Man is a wolf to man', Schopenhauer quoted Plautus as saying. The auction scene is in Galsworthy's play, but that's part of my point. The Skin Game is an early Hitchcock film that became, in effect, a seminal text on which he drew later. Also in the play is the scene near the end in which the young people Jill Hillcrist (Jill Esmond) and Rolf Hornblower (Frank Lawton) meet up again. A bit like Romeo and Juliet (of the clashing Capulet and Montague clans), they fancy each other, despite the acrimony of their families. But in this case, it is plain that recent events have taken a toll. Jill appears almost indifferent to Rolf as she plays with her dog and whistles the Habanera from 'Carmen' (see frame-capture below). Which is apt, given the Habanera's association with the vicissitudes of love. Jill has become almost cynical, as she tells Rolf that 'We're all out for our own'. And next minute she dismisses him - for the time being at least - by quoting from 'Auld Lang Syne': 'If auld acquaintance be forgot ...'. To be continued.
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