Director, Producer

(b. August 31, 1910 London, England - d. January 1, 1988)

Stuart Legg was a talented British documentary filmmaker who played a major role in shaping the early style, aesthetic and working culture of the National Film Board, despite working in Canada for just six years.

Legg was originally recruited by John Grierson in 1939 to make two films – The Case of Charlie Gordon and Youth Is Tomorrow – to promote the Dominion-Provincial Youth Training Plan. These films were a milestone in the development of a mature, socially responsible documentary movement in Canada. He was then named director of production for the Canadian Government Motion Picture Bureau and, in this capacity, was responsible for training and organizing the young staff of a dozen or so filmmakers at the fledgling Film Board. When the Bureau and the NFB merged in 1941, Legg’s charges numbered fifty-five; within a year, the number of staff exploded to 293 (it would peak, in April of 1945, at 739).

A pillar of strength and leadership throughout Grierson’s tenure as NFB commissioner, Legg was given control of the theatrical shorts programme – which included the early Canada Carries On films and The World in Action series, most of which he produced and directed – and often oversaw production on as many as sixty films at any given time, including his own. A highly-skilled editor and screenwriter, his propagandistic style was perfectly suited for wartime efforts, though it still reflected a highly-refined cinematic sensibility, as Ernst Borneman explains in Seth Feldman and Joyce Nelson’s Canadian Film Reader:

Legg’s juxtaposition of contrasting images (country versus country, social
system versus social system, waste versus conservation of resources, etc.),
or his comparison of widely separate images of social progress or of parallel
military and economic developments in different countries, was clearly
unthinkable without Kuleshov’s and Pudovkin’s experiments in montage, and
his constant effort to link images by visual continuity and by carrying
over movement from one shot to the next, clearly stemmed from the first
experiments of the French avant-garde in obtaining such visual flow...

In 1941, Legg’s Churchill’s Island became the first NFB film to win an Academy Award®, taking the prize for best Documentary Short Subject. Though personally characterized by his cool intellectualism, cynicism, sardonic manner and social awkwardness, Legg earned the utmost respect of the younger filmmakers whose skills and work ethics he helped cultivate. The hard-driving, forceful style of his propaganda films became characteristic of many of the early NFB documentaries and his influence on the Board’s structure and organization would be felt for years to come. At the end of the Second World War, Legg joined Grierson in New York to work with The World Today, then returned to London where he served as director of Film Centre.

Film and video work includes

Varsity, 1930 (director)
Pett and Pott: A Fairy Story of the Suburbs (co-associate director with Basil Wright; co-writer (uncredited) with Alberto Cavalcanti; actor (uncredited)
Yugoslavia, 1935 (director)
Night Mail, 1936 (commentator)
The Case of Charlie Gordon, 1939 (director)
The Royal Visit to Canada and the United States of America May 17-June 15, 1939, 1939 (co-editor and co-titles with J. Booth Scott)
Youth Is Tomorrow, 1939 (director)
Atlantic Patrol, Canada Carries On series, 1940 (director; writer; editor; producer)
Children from Overseas, Canada Carries On series, 1940 (producer)
Front of Steel, Canada Carries On series, 1940 (producer)
Letter from Aldershot, Canada Carries On series, 1940 (producer)
Letter from Camp Borden, Canada Carries On series, 1940 (producer)
Toilers of the Grand Banks, 1940 (producer)
Wings of Youth, Canada Carries On series, 1940 (producer)
Battle of Brains, Canada Carries On series, 1941 (producer)
Food: Weapon of Conquest, Canada Carries On/The World in Action series, 1941 (director; editor; producer)
Heroes of the Atlantic, Canada Carries On series, 1941 (co-writer with Graham McInnis)
Peoples of Canada, Canada Carries On series, 1941 (producer)
Soldiers All, Canada Carries On series, 1941 (producer)
Strategy of Metals, Canada Carries On series, 1941 (writer; editor; producer)
Warclouds in the Pacific, Canada Carries On series, 1941 (director; editor; producer)
Wings of a Continent, Canada Carries On series, 1941 (writer; producer)
Battle for Oil, Canada Carries On series, 1942 (director; editor)
Everywhere in the World, Canada Carries On series, 1942 (producer)
Ferry Pilot, World in Action series, 1942 (co-producer with Ross McLean)
Geopolitik - Hitler's Plan for Empire, Canada Carries On/The World in Action series, 1942 (director; producer)
Great Lakes, 1942 (executive producer)
Inside Fighting China, The World in Action series, 1942 (writer; editor; producer)
Inside Fighting Russia, The World in Action series, 1942 (producer)
The Mask of Nippon, The World in Action series, 1942 (writer; producer)
This is Blitz, Canada Carries On/The World in Action series, 1942 (director)
Fighting Dutch, The World in Action series, 1943 (executive producer)
Battle Is Their Birthright, The World in Action series, 1943 (director; writer; editor; producer)
The Gates of Italy, Canada Carries On series, 1943 (co-writer, co-editor and co-producer with Tom Daly)
Balkan Powder Keg, The World in Action series, 1944 (director; writer; editor; producer)
Battle of Europe, The World in Action series, 1944 (co-writer, co-editor and co-producer with Tom Daly)
Fortress Japan, The World in Action series, 1944 (writer; editor; producer)
Future for Fighters, Canada Carries On/Canada Communiqué/Eyes Front series, 1944 (co-producer with James Beveridge)
Global Air Routes, The World in Action series, 1944 (director; writer; editor; producer)
Inside France, The World in Action series, 1944 (co-director with Tom Daly; producer)
Russian Foreign Policy, The World in Action series, 1944 (producer)
When Asia Speaks, The World in Action series, 1944 (writer; editor; producer)
Zero Hour, Canada Carries On series, 1944 (producer)
Food: Secret of the Peace, The World in Action series, 1945 (director; writer; editor; producer)
John Bull's Own Island, The World in Action series, 1945 (director; writer; editor; producer)
Maps in Action, The World in Action series, 1945 (producer)
Now - The Peace, The World in Action series, 1945 (writer; editor; producer)
Spotlight on the Balkans, The World in Action series, 1945 (producer)
PaisB, 1946 (English version)
Tomorrow's Citizens, Canada Carries On series, 1947 (writer; producer)
Our Neighbours to the North, 1948 (writer)
Operation Hurricane, 1954 (producer)
Powered Flight: The Story of the Century, 1954 (director; producer)
The Queen in Australia, 1954 (editor)
Golden Reef, 1956 (producer)
Grierson, 1973 (appears as himself)
Has Anybody Here Seen Canada? A History of Canadian Movies 1939-1953, 1979 (appears as himself; TV)