ABSTRACT
A number of issues are raised by Montgomery’s involvement in film work. Why, for instance, did composing scores dominate his work in the 1950s to such an extent? The answer to this question is money. Before the 1950s Montgomery had made a modest income from his concert music, and although his detective novels had been fairly lucrative, he discovered that film work brought in the money. Film scores, he told an American friend in 1962, ‘even now pay better than books and consequently appeal to my innate instinct for getting relatively large sums of money in return for absolutely small amounts of work’. 1 Montgomery used film work as an excuse for not writing concert music ‘by saying he had to go on writing film music to pay his taxes’. 2 Even if the payments he received as composer and conductor were not always vast, performing rights for successful pictures usually made the work thoroughly worthwhile. Some companies gave their composers only 50 per cent of the performing rights, but Peter Rogers felt they deserved 100 per cent. These rights were worth having. In 1958 Montgomery suggested to the director Sydney Box the unusual approach that he might consider composing for nothing the scores for 78 television films Box was intending to shoot that year if he could have the considerable performing rights fees which would result. 3 In 1959 he wrote to his friend, the author Brian Aldiss: ‘I’m currently composing music for four films in unbroken succession; you don’t happen to know of a cure for the love of money, do you?’ 4 When Peter Rogers made a quip about the £500 Montgomery was paid for scoring Carry On Teacher, he retorted with: ‘Still, even though I am being overpaid, I did do a bit of work on it somewhere back in the lost years of my youth.’ 5
