Ivor Montagu

Biography

Film critic, author and filmmaker Ivor Montagu devoted most of his life to his two passions: cinema and leftist politics. Following studies at the Royal College of Science--where he obtained a degree in zoology and botany--and studies at King's College, Cambridge, where he earned a masters in zoology, Montagu turned towards pursuing his interest in film. He and Sidney Bernstein established the London Film Society, the first film club devoted to showing art films and independent films, in 1925. Over the years Montagu imported films, showed them and eventually began writing, producing, directing and editing his own short films. He also became a film critic, the first to work at such publications as "The Observer". His leftist political leanings led him to a long-term friendship with acclaimed Russian director Sergei Eisenstein, and for a time Montagu traveled with the great filmmaker across Europe and to Hollywood (he later he published an account of this journey in "With Eisenstein in Hollywood"). For a time during the 1930s Montagu produced a few Alfred Hitchcock films including The 39 Steps (1935). During the Spanish Civil War he went to Spain to make propaganda films for the Republicans. Once back in England he compiled some of that footage to make "Peace and Plenty" (1939). Montagu became interested in television in the late '50s and focused his energies there. In 1959 he was awarded the Lenin Peace Prize, and in 1965 he published "Film World" (Penguin), one of the best looks at the situation of the international film industry in the early 1960s.