British producer, writer and director. Communist, aristocrat, son of
the banker Lord Swaythling, the Hon. Ivor Montagu was a leading fixture
in left-wing film activity in the 1930s. One of the founders of the
London Film Society in 1924, in 1934 he organised the Progressive Film
Institute (PFI) as a producing and distributing body for the Communist
Party. The PFI sent a crew (including Thorold
Dickinson and Norman McLaren) to Spain during the Civil War, where
Montagu produced and directed In Defence of Madrid (1936). Peace and
Plenty (1939), directed by Montagu for the Communist Party, followed
McLaren's Hell Unlimited, (1936) in using graphics, puppets and animation
to attack Chamberlain's appeasement policy.
Montagu was editor and title writer for Alfred
Hitchcock's The
Lodger (1926), associate producer of The
Man Who Knew Too Much (1934) and The
39 Steps (1935), and first film critic of the Observer and the New
Statesman. He was a friend and translator of Eisenstein, and accompanied
him on his visit to Hollywood and Mexico, recording the trip in his
book With Eisenstein in Hollywood (1968). During World War II he worked
for the Ministry of Information, and he was a scriptwriter at Ealing
after the war. He was awarded the Lenin Peace Prize in 1959.
