The Skin Game

The Skin Game (1931) is an early Alfred Hitchcock talkie you can watch online on iFILM. A long-established landed family, the Hillcrists, collide with Hornblower, a self-made industrialist buying up the fields around their estate.

Hornblower swears he'll put up housing for his workers, then breaks his word and bulldozes the old way of life. The Hillcrists strike back with his own weapons — digging into the buried past of his daughter-in-law. An auction, a blackmail threat, a public unmasking: both sides are certain they're righteous, and both cross a line they can't take back. Edmund Gwenn makes Hornblower far harder to condemn than he ought to be.

Adapted from the play by Nobel laureate John Galsworthy, it runs on sharp dialogue and a class war billed as ancestral pride against industrial progress. For Hitchcock it's a transitional piece — he's still feeling out sound, yet the auction sequence already tightens with his signature grip. Stream The Skin Game (1931) online on iFILM.