If you had said to anyone in the early 1930s that Alfred Hitchcock would not only go on to make two of the greatest British films of all time in that very decade, but then go on to make several more of the greatest films of all time regardless of nation, I'm quite sure few people would have believed you.

The Skin Game is yet another bafflingly dreary and depressing melodrama about a pair of families that ultimately destroy one another over a piece of property. Accusations of blackmail, prostitution and extortion are thrown back and forth, and aside from some neat camera trickery during the film's best scene, a tense auction over said property, there is little hint of Hitchcock's apparently dormant genius.

Indeed, only Ronald Frankau as an amusingly knackered auctioneer provides any real entertainment or level of amusement. Otherwise it is more of the same strangely dreary early Hitchcock fare. When do the stabbings start, for hell's sake?!