The Honourable Rebel

A fascinating life gets a painfully bland docu-biog in this plodding attempt to do justice to the exploits of aristo Elizabeth Montagu. In her time she worked as an actress, a classical pianist, a WWII spy and later a fixer on the set of classic noir ‘The Third Man’. Clearly she was a woman of wide-ranging passions and talents, but first time-director Mike Fraser (a veteran post-production technician) gets lost in exposition without really knowing what to say about his intriguing subject.

There are testimonies from Montagu’s surviving relatives and friends, archive photos of the lady herself and her circle, fine in themselves, but unfortunately slotted into a series of woodenly performed and clumsily-scripted dramatisations. Dorothea Myer-Bennett looks the part in wartime uniform as the script sensibly lingers over tense scrapes in Nazi-occupied France, but her jolly-hockey-sticks brusqueness proves somewhat lacking when emotional delicacy is required.