Stuart Legg

Stuart Legg (31 August 1910 – 23 July 1988) was a pioneering documentary filmmaker. At the 14th Academy Awards in 1941, Legg's National Film Board of Canada film Churchill's Island became the first-ever documentary to win an Oscar. Also in contention for Best Documentary that year was Legg's film Warclouds in the Pacific. Francis Stuart Legg was one of three children born to Ethel Green Legg and Arthur Legg, a solicitor. In 1929, after graduating from Cambridge University with a degree in engineering, Legg was hired as an assistant to director Walter Creighton at Publicity Films. For Creighton, he made two films, and met John Grierson, who would become his mentor and life-long friend and colleague.Grierson had recently returned from studying in the U.S., where he had become very active in the film world. He saw a lack of public engagement and knowledge of events as contributing to threats to democracy, and saw documentary films as an art-form which could also keep the public informed and involved. He founded the Documentary Film Movement, and recruited several young filmmakers, including Legg. At the time, Grierson was a films officer at the Empire Marketing Board, a government agency which had been formed to encourage trade and national unity. Legg's first film for Grierson was The New Generation (1932), which was said to "exemplify an attempt at the Russian technique." In 1933, the Empire Marketing Board was dissolved and the film unit was moved to the General Post Office. Legg would stay with the GPO Film Unit until 1937, when he replaced Paul Rotha as head of the Strand Film Company. At this time, he was commissioned, by the British Film Council, to write the report Money Behind the Screen.In 1938, the government of Canada invited Grierson to examine the country's film production system. In 1939, he was invited back and became the first Commissioner of the National Film Board. He brought Legg to Canada to make two films whose purpose was to promote the Dominion-Provincial Youth Training Program. The films, The Case of Charlie Gordon and Youth Is Tomorrow, are regarded as milestones in the development of a mature, socially responsible documentary movement in Canada.Legg decided to stay in Canada, and became Director of Production for the Canadian Government Motion Picture Bureau. In this role, he was responsible for the training of filmmakers; when the Bureau and the NFB merged in 1941, he was responsible for 55 filmmakers; a year later, it was 293.With Canada at war, Legg's propagandist style was a perfect fit for the morale-boosting films that the NFB wanted to produce; he was given control of the theatrical shorts program, which included two series: Canada Carries On and The World in Action. Records are incomplete but it is thought that, from 1941 to 1945, he produced and directed most of the films in these series; he is credited with 46. His assistant and researcher was Tom Daly, who would become the NFB's most prolific producer.The World in Action, which began in 1942, appeared each month in 800 Canadian theatres, reaching 4 million viewers; in the U.S., it screened in 6,500 theatres and reached millions. At the end of the war, it was cancelled but Grierson felt that it was commercially viable. He resigned from the NFB and convinced Legg to join him in New York, where he was able to reach a production deal with Universal Pictures. Grierson's reputation was temporarily damaged when he was caught up in the Gouzenko Affair and accused of being a spy; the deal with Universal was cancelled and, in 1946, Legg returned to England.In 1940 the GPO Film Unit had become the Crown Film Unit and Legg spent three years there as a producer. In 1952, the British government dissolved the Crown Film Unit and Legg became chairman of Film Centre International, a production coordination company which Grierson had founded in 1937. Through Film Centre, Legg produced films for Gaumont-British Instructional and the Shell Film Unit. Records are incomplete, but it is thought that, between 1952 and 1962, he also produced promotional films for Shell-Mex and BP, Imperial Airways, Anglo-Scottish Pictures and the Australian National Film Board. He retired in 1962.