Documentary News Letter (1947-1949)

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68 DOCUMENTARY FILM NEWS at first sight, Stuart Legg is a sombre puritanical character, with a keen nose for detail, and, paradoxially, an aptitude for wearing primrose neckties. We remember with embarrassment our muffled rage when he took over the producership of Strand in 1937 (Rotha was at that time leaving for a year's session at the Museum of Modern Art in New York) and he promptly announced his intention of descending on our snug location in South Wales 'to help with our dialogue shooting'. (It was our first dialogue film, and he was only taking wise precautions, but what we expect from the old governor we do not always take from a new broom.) Within one hour of his arrival, he had made himself more helpful than any producer we have ever known, which helpfulness continued for the next three days, without Stuart ever apparently emerging from the background or visibly opening his mouth. When he got back he told his wife Margaret that he was greatly impressed with our capabilities as a director, and she dutifully passed on the information. Thereafter we would have died for him gladly — certainly we were prepared to work ourselves to death. Now, we too, produce — but that high level of skill or that low level of cunning we dare not hope to attain. As a servant of documentary Stuart is prehistoric. He is first found in the Cambridge reminiscences of equivalent old-timers like Basil Wright and Humphrey Jennings, busily working away on Power (production: Cambridge Film Society), and developing a majestic social conscience. (Incidentally, he once accused us of being dominated by a social conscience; that's like Stuart's puritanical nature, to attribute to others the virtues he is too austere to claim for himself.) It is true he so far deviated from the stem line of duty as to meet his wife while he was still in statu pupillari: but in fairness it must be recorded that Margaret Amos was a don's daughter. After leaving Cambridge, Legg worked with Gaumont British Instructional from 1931-2; then he joined the Empire Marketing Board Film Unit and stayed on, after the GPO took over, until 1937. Next he was translated to Film Centre, and very soon afterwards to Strand, where he stayed till the summer of 1939. From then on he fits into the pattern of the develop Stuart Legg A Close-Up by Donald Alexander ment of the National Film Board of Canada, first of all in Ottawa, and latterly in New York. His chief for so long, John Grierson, gives Legg maximum credit for the 'World in Action' series, which in international short films distribution ranks second only to the older 'March of Time'. Now there are rumours that he is coming back, and that is the second most heartening piece of news we have heard in a long time. From the beginning Stuart Legg never made the pretty films, which hit the headlines and got the swagger box office bookings. Certainly he directed BBC Voice of Britain, and (with Anstey) Under the City, but his has mostly been the hard graft of contriving something out of nothing, of personally editing ramshackle material into presentable shape; of pulling whole series of films out of limbo, of pioneering difficult projects. The cutting-room and his office-desk have been the control points at which he has always been found with his coat off and his sleeves up, pushing out more product to the minute than any other film maker since D. W. Griffith. We remember Wings Over the Empire — probably the most thoughtful and moving of all the Strand Imperial Airways films, patched together out of all the bits and pieces discarded by the directors who had shot (or had shot for them) their private material for their private epics. We remember how through Legg the evolutionary plan which Julian Huxley was struggling to communicate to us stupid filmmakers suddenly began to illuminate the whole series of zoological films made at Strand, and how it reached fulfilment in Hawes' Monkey into Man and in Legg's own Fingers and Thumbs. We remember, too, how he sat down and wrote a treatment for an Economic Survey of Scotland, which country he had never visited, and how little that line was altered in the final Wealth of a Nation after we (who were indigenous anyway) had been for months on the spot reporting with a camera. Working and living hard, harder than circumstances really require, seems always to have been Stuart and Margaret Legg's motto. But typically, some of the most memorable things about them are their contributions to the off-duty apocrypha of documentary. On a Friday night or a Saturday morning, out would come the old RollsRoyce (yes, it was a Rolls-Royce: touring model, vintage 1924, picked up for £60), and we would trundle off from the workaway Legg domicile on Shooter's Hill to a clapboarded farm in Lamberhurst, Kent, from which Stuart fondly imagined he would some time be able to commute (poor Stuart, there was no commuting for him until he took out a season from New York to Ottawa). And very determinedly we would ride horses at Tentcrdcn, or pace the back seat quarter deck of the Rolls down to the Elephant's Head at Hook Green, and stay watching cricket and playing darts and drinking vast quantities of beer for a long summer's evening. Once we took Legg on a ceremonial drive round Scotland, with Grierson and Wright acting as official cicerones to this country he had written up but never seen. We remember every roaring detail from the preliminary dinner at Rogano's Sea Food Restaurant to the formal visit to the Grierson ancestors in a churchyard beside Bannockburn, and Stuart's gloomy acceptance of the evolutionary plausibility of a hairy Highland Cow, contrasted with Grierson's rapturous and improbable claim never before to have encountered the species. That time we were stationed in Glasgow — at the Central Hotel — because Grierson insisted (probably rightly) that it was the only place to which important contacts could decently be invited. Stuart stuck it for one night; the next day we moved to a quiet pub in Bath Street where our joint social consciences were not offended by 'plain breakfast' (coffee and roll) at 2s. 6d., and where the beer was better. Our contacts still came to the Central; like them, we just called in. SOUND AND THE DOCUMENTARY FILM By KEN CAMERON With a Foreword by CAVALCANTI 'He is undoubtedly well-qualified to speak on sound recording matters relative to documentary production.' —THE CINE TECHNICIAN *He has provided the textbook on sound which every student and future writer on the cinema will find indispensable." —SIGHT AND SOUND With numerous illustrations 15/net PITMAN Parker Street Kingsway London WC2