By DON GROVES
Variety alumni David Stratton (Strat) has been remembered as a great educator, one of the last of the old guard of film critics and a passionate supporter of Australian cinema.
Industry colleagues and friends gathered at the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s ABC’s Sydney studios on November 21 to pay homage to Stratton, who died (https://simesite.net/aussie-variety-film-critic-david-stratton-ankles-scene/) on August 14 in a hospital near his home in the Blue Mountains, aged 85.
Director George Miller said the emergence of Australian film in the 1970s and 80s “would not have had anything like the trajectory it enjoyed” if not for Stratton’s advocacy as director of the Sydney Film Festival, a job he took in 1965, aged 26.
The English-born Stratton programmed Miller’s first work, the short film Violence in Cinema: Part 1, at the fest in 1972, leading to Australia-wide distribution which, Miller said, gave him and producer Byron Kennedy the confidence to make Mad Max.
He was a familiar face to Australian viewers as the co-host with Margaret Pomeranz of movie review shows for pubcasters the ABC and SBS, for more than three decades.
An emotional Pomeranz told attendees that Strat jealously kept interviews of female stars such as Nicole Kidman and Kate Winslet to himself, and he cried when Grace Kelly married Prince Rainier of Monaco.
She made fun of his habit of seeming to wear the same pair of black shoes in every TV show. He later admitted he has numerous pairs of the same brand. She gave him a pair, which sat on an empty couch in the studio.
ABC chair Kim Williams recalled how Stratton greatly assisted him in the 1980s when Williams was appointed CEO of the Australian Film Commission, where Stratton was a commissioner. “He was a true film historian,” he said.
David Rooney, chief film critic of The Hollywood Reporter, met Stratton when he was a teenager and subsequently they were colleagues at Variety. “He had a great reputation far beyond Australia,” he said in a clip recorded in New York.
For 33 years Stratton was a lecturer on world cinema at the University of Sydney until 2023 when he was forced to stop due to ill health. One former student estimated he screened 900 films and thousands of film clips during his tenure.
Sydney Film Festival director Nashen Moodley paid tribute to Stratton’s successful battle against film censorship in the 1960s and 70s. He campaigned for the introduction of a restricted, or R, certificate and to release details of cuts ordered by the censors, ending a cloak of secrecy.?
“He was a man of international cinema and a font of cinematic knowledge,” Moodley said. In September, the festival honoured his life and work by screening his favourite film, Singin’ in the Rain.
His wife Susie Craig said: “He led a long, productive and fulfilling life in the industry he loved.”
He wrote numerous books on film including The Last New Wave, The Avocado Plantation and 101 Marvellous Movies You May Have Missed. His final tome, Australia at the Movies, compiled reviews of nearly every Australian feature film produced between 1990 and 2020.
Attendees included directors Bruce Beresford and Anna Kokkinos, producers Sue Milliken, Al Clark and Richard Brennan and exhibitor Anthony Zeccola.