"The Skin Game is another photographed play, less enclosed than Juno and the Paycock. To write about it is to find oneself writing about (the playwright) Galsworthy rather than Hitchcock. Class is the only theme they have in common, central in one and reticent in the other, perhaps because downhill for Galsworthy is uphill for Hitchcock....Hitchcock's film seems to be of greatest interest, not only because Galsworthy's play can still involve us in its drama and carry us along, but because the film reproduces so many attitudes of a period roughly contemporaneous with the play, and quite without the falsities of cultural elevation. Indeed, Hitchcock slightly alters its social perspective. Galsworthy, a Forsyte by class, began by trying to criticize his kind, but ended up by admiring them....Hitchcock refuses to relax his focus into any sentimental fuzziness" (Raymond Durgnat). The story tells of a feud between rival families, one landed gentry, the other nouveau riche.