Ivor Montagu (1904–1984)

Montagu is on the very left of the cover picture from the La Sarraz conference, partly cut off; Eisenstein is in front of him on the bench, next to Janine Boissounousse and Hans Richter.

Ivor Montagu was the son of a wealthy English banking family; he studied zoology but became a prominent figure in the world of international table-tennis, a left-wing film-maker and journalist, a founder-member of the cinematic trade union ACTT, and a peace activist.

He had already made several visits to the Soviet Union before he became friendly with Eisenstein at the famous 1929 conference of avant-garde film-makers hosted by Hélène de Mandrot at her Swiss château, La Sarraz. When Eisenstein and his colleagues Grigory Alexandrov and Eduard Tisse turned up, they ripped up the programme of papers and talk sessions and got everyone dressed up in their hostess's collection of medieval armour to make an improvised film (sadly, the only known print of it seems to have been lost in Japan during WWII).

According to Montagu, the three Russians didn't see the point of making any more silent films, but knew the authorities wouldn't let them make talkies until enough Soviet Union cinemas had the equipment to show them, which wouldn't be until the next five-year plan, so they had arranged to go travelling for a year. The Montagus were planning to go to Hollywood anyway, so Ivor offered to put in a word for Eisenstein there, and it wasn't long before they and the three Russians were settled into a house in Beverly Hills together, on a retainer from Paramount, and working on a number of film projects.

With the usual bizarre logic of early thirties Hollywood, a great deal of time and effort were invested in projects that stood very little chance of getting off the ground, and after six months the studio politely thanked them and wished them well for their future careers. Power struggles within the studio that had nothing to do with Eisenstein seem to have been mostly responsible, but the studio did also come under some pressure from right-wingers who didn't think a Soviet director should be making American films (not as big a deal in the thirties as in the fifties, but still relevant). Montagu describes the complex negotiations with the studio, and the group's life in Hollywood, especially their friendship with Chaplin. Plus various nude-scenes in Douglas Fairbanks's Turkish bath, confrontations with the official studio bootlegger (Montagu didn't drink), and general Hollywood name-dropping.

After a few complete false starts, some of which might have been very interesting — a Haitian revolution film with Paul Robeson; Shaw's Devil's disciple; The war of the worlds (Wells had offered it to them, forgetting that it was already sold elsewhere...); something called The glass house, about a post-privacy world — they settled on two serious projects, which were scripted out: Sutter's Gold, from the novel by Blaise Cendrars, and Theodore Dreiser's An American Tragedy. The first scripts of both, co-written by Eisenstein, Alexandrov and Montagu, are included in the book. They would certainly both have come out as very political films, if they had ever been made, with some interesting non-realistic elements. But of course the studio got cold feet, and that was that.

Montagu didn't go on to Mexico with Eisenstein, but he does give us his analysis of why the Mexican film was never completed: Upton Sinclair, who found the money for the project, had no experience of cinema, and he didn't employ a producer to manage Eisenstein's work, so they just went on shooting what they thought they needed until Sinclair got scared by how much it was all costing and asked Stalin to summon the boys home.

An interesting little footnote in cinema history.… (meer)