The hook for Luke Korem’s engaging documentary, “Lord Montagu,” is scandal and sex. But that becomes just a prologue, abandoned early on in this story of a bisexual British lord who survived imprisonment for his sexual orientation and went on to save the family estate through a combination of passion, chutzpah and desperate showmanship.
Lord Montagu of Beaulieu grew up in Palace House, one of the lesser Great Houses among Britain’s vast estates. His father died when he was young, and he grew up a fey and high-voiced dandy who liked “both girls AND boys.”
That got him into trouble in the 1950s, when he was accused of sexual improprieties with young Boy Scouts (acquitted) and then hounded into prison for facilitating a sexual encounter between a Royal Air Force officer and his same sex lover.
Korem’s film, using modern interviews with friends, relatives and historians, archival TV footage and narration (actor Oliver Tobias reads from Montagu’s memoir), does a wonderful job at providing context. In the 1950s, Britain still had The Buggery Act of 1533 in force. And thanks to the gay treason scandal at the British spy service, homosexuality was linked to communism. Even a peer of the realm could be a police target.
Korem suggests that Montagu’s “sensational” trial had something to do with Britain eventually rescinded that ancient law, but provides no evidence of that.
The filmmaker is far more interested in how Montagu, trying to save Palace House, Beaulieu Abbey and the thousands of acres in the South of England that are his inheritance. “Lord Montagu” shifts from tragic scandal to triumph as a member of Britain’s idle class reinvented himself as the country’s greatest preserver of antique cars, building a popular museum that fed the national car craze that endures to this day, with or without the canceling of “Top Gear.”
Montagu, his ex wife and current wife, and children, go on about creating a tourist attraction and then having to live in it — “We live above the shop” — but reveal just what it takes to preserve a piece of national history, houses that have been the setting of hundreds of period pieces, from “Pride & Prejudice” to “Downton Abbey.”
It’s a fascinating life, but one this suited-for-TV documentary has, we guess, only skimmed the surface of.

MPAA Rating: unrated, adult themes and subject matter

Cast: Lord Montagu of Beaulieu, Sir Jackie Stewart, Sir Stirling Moss, Oliver Tobias
Credits: Directed by Luke Korem, script by Luke Korem, Bradley Jackson. A Gravitas release.

Running time: 1:20