Montague Love - certainly an intriguing name - but his own - started
his working life as a newspaper man in London. His primary expertise
centered on being a field illustrator and cartoonist who covered the
Boer War (1899-1902). His realistic battle sketches gained him
popularity among readers, but he was bound for a different career. He
decided to become an actor. A robust man with a massive head of noble
bearing and brooding lower lip, these were ingredients well suited to
this goal. Love honed basic stage talents in London, and then made an
early departure for the US in 1913 with a road-company production of
Cyril Maude's "Grumpy." An early stop was Broadway, and he returned
many times to appear in a laundry list of important plays from 1913 to
1934.
Silent film studios of the early days were originally based in the
East, and Love started his film career at World Studios, New Jersey in
1914. His silent career alone was prodigious-nearly a hundred films.
His look and bearing were perfect for authoritative figures. And,
though certainly taking on a whole spectrum of roles (sultan, native
chiefs, many a doctor and military officer, among many others) he
became famous for his bad guy characterizations through the 1920s. Some
historians credit him as the best villain of the silent era.
In 1926 he was nemesis to Rudolf Valentino in Der Sohn des Scheich (1926) and 'John Barrymore' in Don Juan (1926).
The latter movie had the particular fame of sporting the longest sword
duel in silent history between Love's Count Giano Donati and
Barrymore's Don Juan. The fight filming was unique and realistic with
middle and close shots looking directly at the individual
combatants-with the appropriate blood in their eyes. The duel was all
the more complex choreography for being one with swords and daggers
(historically correct but rarely seen in film history). But Love was
just as effective as the Roman centurion in The King of Kings (1927) by
'Cecil B DeMille'. Starting with Erfahrene Frau gesucht (1929), Love's movies followed the trend of an
increasing number of silent films using recorded music and some
snatches of dialogue or background sound with the several incipient
audio systems. Some movies originally issued as silent were released
again with the process added. `Sin' was one of 11 films of 1929
featuring Love given the semi-sound treatment. The last of these was
Jules Verne's The Mysterious Island (1929), very loosely adapted to the point of being
hokey, but one of the first films also using the primitive two-color
process.
Love had a commanding, puckered-lip British delivery of speech which he
could believably weld to any part, but it particularly fit characters
of authority, as in the silent era. Into the 1930s, these were
increasingly benign rather than despotic-always colonels and generals,
prime ministers, American presidents - even Zorro's father. Perhaps his
best known character tour de force displaying his genuine acting power
was his Henry VIII in Prince and the Pauper (1937). It is hard to
forget him in purple as the Bishop of the Black Canons in The
Adventures of Robin Hood (1938). Sometimes, as with other veteran
character actors, his roles were almost as featured extra-but his very
costumed presence was all that was needed to lend realism. A very apt
example was his Detchard, noble henchmen to 'Raymond Massey', in Der Gefangene von Zenda (1937), in
which he has little more than one line. He was still in demand in the
early 1940s - ten roles in 1940 alone. But these slowed into the war
years. By his passing in 1943, an actor who was considered as noble on
screen as off, he had lent his voice as well as virtuoso acting skills
to eighty-one additional films.
