It’s late November and the venerable film critic David Stratton is giving his last lesson on world cinema at the University of Sydney’s Centre for Continuing Education. After 35 years of showing up for his students, some of whom have returned this in kind by enrolling for 32 consecutive years, Stratton is not here tonight. At least not in a physical sense.
While he had kept coming to the city from the Blue Mountains through Covid, deteriorating eyesight and more recently a spine fracture, an unexpected month in hospital had really stuck a spoke in his wheels. Four weeks from the course’s scheduled end, Stratton asked the director Claude Gonzalez to step in to take over.
On this night, the last, Stratton phones in to farewell students and introduce his all-time favourite movie, Singin’ in the Rain: “I grew up on musicals and this is the best musical ever made.”
It’s said in a manner familiar to most Australians from Stratton’s 28 years of co-presenting The Movie Show (SBS) and At The Movies (ABC) with Margaret Pomeranz; his way of speaking plainly and decisively – digging in his heels if Pomeranz disagreed – and, whether he liked a film or not, in a tone that always revealed his love of cinema itself.
That tenderness is very evident tonight. “The sequence where Gene Kelly dances in the street in the pouring rain with an umbrella and the camera soars up on a crane shot and the music soars as well,” the 84-year-old says to the class. “That moment is pure cinema. There’s nothing quite like it for me.”
There is silence in the auditorium among students who are “devastated” and “immensely saddened” the course is ending. Stratton has a final word for them. “Michael?” he says to the audio-visual technician Michael McCartney. “Let’s get that MGM lion roaring, OK?”
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When Stratton’sfinal review runs in The Australian today, it’s his signoff on a 57-year career as a mainstay on Australian televisions, newspapers, radios and bookshelves. “We’ve grown up with David as part of our film conversation, in our living rooms,” says Gonzalez. “I don’t think anyone could equal his advocacy for cinema.”
Of retirement, Stratton says: “You obviously can’t keep going for ever. I feel relaxed about it. I’ve done the best I could over a number of years and I feel a sense of satisfaction from that. I’ve already been advising some of the film-makers and distributors that I won’t be reviewing any more and I’m getting lovely messages back.”
Stratton’s Thursday evening course, a history of world cinema, ran over two 12-week semesters a year. When it began in its current format in 1990, Stratton could move from the origins of cinema to around 1980 at a fairly fast clip. As the years passed, he says, more films became available “so the progress of the course slowed dramatically”.
Nazi cinema, Russian cinema and other gaps were filled as the course broadened out. It meant that loyal students such as Michele Aspery, who re-enrolled annually from 1990, were never shown the same feature film twice by their fastidious teacher. Aspery estimates Stratton has presented about 840 films and 7,506 extracts.
“He’s the greatest teacher in Australia, and possibly the world, with his vast knowledge of cinema and access to films,” she says.
Graham Heath has attended just as long. “I said to myself, as long as David keeps coming, I’ll keep coming too,” he says. “Now he can’t, that’s it for me.”
Flynn Boffo, a 22-year-old screen production student, only enrolled this semester. When Stratton showed the 1957 western The Tall T, Boffo got a taste of one of his teacher’s biggest irritations. “Some of us laughed as a reaction to the misogyny and David didn’t like it,” he says.
“Oh yes,” recalls Stratton. “There were some younger people who hadn’t been to my course before who broke that, well, that rule. I feel quite passionately that cinema reflects the time when it was made.” A quote from LP Hartley’s 1953 book The Go-Between explains his perspective: “The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there. If you go to a country with different customs, you don’t mock them.” Seared into his memory is seeing a silent film during which the audience laughed throughout. “I was so disgusted by that. I just think it’s rude to mock something that in its day was perfectly valid.”
Stratton’s first high-profile job was in 1966 when his fight against film censorship led to an invitation to direct the Sydney film festival. He did so for 18 years, growing the event’s size, scope and impact.
“My tenure as director coincided with the Australian film revival, so I was able to show the first films of Peter Weir, Gillian Armstrong, Fred Schepisi, Phillip Noyce and all those people, becoming friends with them in the process,” he says. “It was a wonderfully rich period here but the 70s was a fantastic time for cinema internationally too.”
When speaking about his career, a word that arises a lot is “invited” or “asked”. “I never did apply for a job,” Stratton says, a note of astonishment still present, perhaps because he is not university educated. “I never even finished high school,” he says. Despite being an autodidact, Stratton has written five books and has two honorary doctorates. He has sat on many international juries at film festivals, chaired by people such as David Lynch and Annette Bening, and brims with anecdotes, which he tells well. Once he dialled in for his Friday afternoon gig on 2UE from the director Noyce’s Los Angeles home. Stratton had sought a quiet room but Uma Thurman and Nicole Kidman tracked him down and pulled faces, trying to make him laugh on air.
During the 1980s, Stratton’s roles started to stack up. He traveled the world, attending the top film festivals and in 1984 began reviewing for Variety, “read by everybody who is anybody in showbiz”. Did he worry his voice was too prevalent? “I did worry,” he says. “You have to have other opinions.” Yet people were often “insistent” he accept jobs. “Probably I was doing too much,” he says, thoughtfully. And then, with that classic David Stratton decisiveness: “But anyway. I did it.”
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Tales of the good life – travel, food, wine and enjoying the company of film industry friends – are woven in with Stratton’s tireless work ethic. He disagrees with former Sydney Morning Herald film critic Paul Byrne’s assertion that you can’t be friends with film-makers. “I was friendly with a good many film-makers but it’s not easy because … they don’t always make good films.” If Stratton had a bad review of a friend’s film to unleash, he’d call them with a heads-up. And then do his job.
As the feature film programmer at SBS from 1980 to 2003, Stratton brought hundreds of foreign offerings to local audiences, many subtitled in English for the first time. “I’m still today hearing from people who discovered films and film-makers on SBS and I’m very proud of that,” he says.
It’s where he met Margaret Pomeranz, who was then a producer at SBS. They became friends over a series of boozy lunches and the pair noted that Australia had no national TV show devoted to movie reviews. At first they sought a co-host externally. “I very strongly said ‘I should do this with a woman, it would be much better with a woman’,” Stratton says. “But we couldn’t find anybody and Margaret stepped in at the last minute and of course she was wonderful.”
Their pilot, however, was “terrible”, so they hid it from SBS executives and went straight into filming episode one. “The night it went to air, nobody had seen the pilot,” Stratton says. “We invited people to Margaret’s house, one or two film-makers, and the amazing thing was that it clicked from the start. And it just sort of gained popularity.
“We were so different. Margaret was not a habitual filmgoer like me. I’d see every single thing from minor horror films and all the rest. But Margaret was like most people, very selective about what she saw.”
Were their infamous disagreements ever staged? “Before we sat down we had no idea what each other’s opinion was. It was all completely spontaneous.”
For every Stratton story about a famous actor or director, his students have stories about their teacher’s dedication – calling them with answers to questions he didn’t adequately cover in class, or providing printed lists of obscure French films.
“Over the years I’ve gleaned a lot of knowledge about cinema from as many countries as make films, really, and I wanted to impart that to others,” he says. “The fact that people wanted to hear about it, and see it, was an added bonus. I’d probably have done it if nobody was there.”
Retirement, Stratton says, will involve relaxing, reading and sleeping. “I’d like to watch one new movie every day that I haven’t seen before,” he adds. “And from time to time watch an old movie that I want to see again. That’s what I’d like to do.”
Films in Stratton’s last semester of a history of world cinema
Brief Encounter (1945); Charlie’s Country (2013); Blackmail (1929); The Day the Earth Caught Fire (1961); Alias Betty (2001); One, Two, Three (1961); Talk To Her (2002); Witness (1985); The Tall T (1957); Distant Voices, Still Lives (1988); Duck Soup (1933); Singin’ in the Rain (1952).
