‘I thought I’d go completely blind’: Cruellest blow for a movie critic hits David Stratton

David Stratton calls it his “peculiarity”. Even at 85, the beloved former critic aims to watch a film he has never seen every single day.

“I haven’t actually seen one today,” he says over lunch. “But I hope I will later in the day.”

“There was a long time when I thought I’d go completely blind”: David Stratton at the Conservation Hut Cafe in Wentworth Falls.Credit: Rhett Wyman

Whenever Stratton watches one of these new films – another peculiarity – he writes a page of notes about it as soon as possible afterwards, including the basic credits, run time and year of production.

It’s something he has been doing since he was a cinema-loving 10-year-old growing up in England before coming to Australia under the “ten pound” scheme in 1963. After 18 years as director of Sydney Film Festival, he became famous for reviewing films with Margaret Pomeranz for SBS then the ABC.

But what has made Stratton’s devotion to watching films difficult lately is his health. While he is as sharp, engaging and enthusiastic about cinema as ever, the cruellest thing has happened for someone whose life has centred on films: a disease that has caused the loss of eyesight in one eye and limited vision in the other.

“There was a long time when I thought I’d go completely blind,” he says. “The doctors thought I might. It was sort of on the edge but, fortunately, we caught it in time.”

The Benny Sends Me with bacon from The Conservation Hut Cafe at Wentworth FallsCredit: Sydney Morning Herald

When he looks at me across the table at The Conservation Hut Cafe at Wentworth Falls in the Blue Mountains, which is near Stratton and his wife Susie’s home at Leura, I’m apparently hazy. Films “are not crystal sharp”, he says, “but they’re watchable”, even with subtitles.

Apart from affecting his vision, giant cell arteritis – “a blockage of the arteries in the brain” – has caused another health drama. Steroids to treat it weakened Stratton’s bones to the point where he has twice had a fractured back. “Once it was just a crack but very painful,” he says. “And the second time the bone was absolutely crushed, and that’s why I’m on crutches. I had to really learn to walk again.”

After being in hospital for a month, Stratton is on medication to strengthen his bones, and his eyesight is not diminishing any further.

We get the health update out of the way quickly once the friendly staff guide us to an outside table. The cafe, which overlooks Jamison Valley, is packed during school holidays. Stratton already knows what he wants: a weak long black, a juice (carrot, ginger and orange) and Benny Sends Me, which is eggs benedict with bacon. I go for a favourite of Susie’s, Teriyaki Salmon Poke Bowl and, because it sounds apt, a Beetlejuice (carrot, celery, ginger, orange and beetroot).

The reason for lunch is not to discuss what Stratton has been watching lately, although that’s another peculiarity. He and Susie have been working through films by actors Sidney Poitier, Richard Widmark, Meryl Streep, Dirk Bogarde, Deborah Kerr and now Gregory Peck in the order in which they were made, drawing on his estimated 20,000 DVDs at their home.

Having retired from reviewing for The Australian late last year, Stratton has a new book out, Australia at the Movies, at the end of the month. It’s a compilation of short reviews of Australian films made between 1990 and 2020 that follows up his earlier books The Last New Wave (Australian film in the 1970s) and The Avocado Plantation (1980s).

Encyclopedia-style film books often focus on credits and a brief plot summary, but Stratton leaves the reader in no doubt how he feels about the films he covers. If he doesn’t like it, it’s clear.

The skateboard drama Deck Dogz is “an exceedingly tedious film”. The go-karting drama Go! “could have been written by a robot as it packs in every imaginable cliche of the youthful sporting movie”. The comedy Swinging Safari is “a laughless lump of a film”.

The little-seen crime thriller Joe Doe is “an obnoxious film” with a message that is “dubious at best”. In The Dressmaker, Kate Winslet is “clearly a couple of decades too old for the character she is supposedly playing”, which means the plot doesn’t make much sense. And sitting through the crime thriller Beast is “a major chore”.

But there are also triumphs in these 30 years that Stratton loved.

“I had to really learn to walk again”: David StrattonCredit: Rhett Wyman

Mad Max: Fury Road “delivered everything that revheads, video-game players and lovers of non-stop action had been waiting for”. Animal Kingdom is “a remarkable debut [by writer-director David Michod], which breathes fresh life into the tired crime-film genre”. Horror film The Babadook is “a riveting debut feature from writer-director Jennifer Kent”.

Expecting to be asked his favourite Australian films from these three decades, Stratton takes out a list of no less than 58. It includes such hits – listed this time in alphabetical order rather than the year they were made – as The Adventures Of Priscilla, The Castle, Happy Feet, Lantana, Lion, Moulin Rouge! , Muriel’s Wedding, Penguin Bloom, The Piano, Rabbit Proof Fence, Samson & Delilah, Shine, Strictly Ballroom, Ten Canoes and Two Hands.

But Australia at the Movies is especially valuable when Stratton highlights small-scale gems that went largely unseen when they were released.

A Lion Returns writer-director Serhat Caradee (left) with actors Maha Wilson (centre) and Danny Elacci (right).Credit: Rhett Wyman

While he agrees that too few brilliant young Australian filmmakers have emerged in recent years, he loved Serhat Caradee’s A Lion Returns, a drama about a jihadist who secretly comes back from fighting in Syria to see his dying mother, and Ana Kokkinos’ Blessed, which dramatises the lives of endangered children and their struggling mothers.

“The commercial failure of an extremely fine film like Blessed is one of the greatest disappointments of Australian cinema over the past three decades and has undoubtedly set back the cause of probing realist filmmaking,” Stratton writes.

Other little-seen gems include Partho Sen-Gupta’s Slam, a thriller that centres on the disappearance of a young Muslim woman, Samuel Van Grinsven’s gay coming-of-age drama Sequin in a Blue Room, Ben Young’s Hounds of Love, about a Perth couple who are serial killers, Dee McLachlan’s sex-trafficking thriller The Jammed, and Paul Ireland’s Pawno, which centres on a Melbourne hock shop.

Stratton says he now regrets stopping At The Movies, his ABC show with Pomeranz that ran from 2003 to 2014, because it could have championed a film like Slam to help it find an audience.

Stratton regrets calling time on At The Movies, the show he hosted with Margaret Pomeranz.

“It was my fault that we ended the show because I found it increasingly onerous,” he says. The problem was having to spend three or four nights in Sydney to watch films and shoot the show, which wasn’t fair on Susie.

“Margaret wanted to go on, and I said, ‘No. If we stop now, the ABC will find a young couple who can take over from us.′ And they didn’t.”

Stratton thinks it’s a shame there isn’t a regular film review show on TV any more.

“It seems to be an obvious show for the ABC, SBS or someone to do because it doesn’t cost very much,” he says. “The clips are free. The talent – they didn’t pay us all that much so it’s a very modestly budgeted program which actually attracted quite a big audience.

“But I think that’s a worldwide thing. The Americans used to have Siskel and Ebert, the English used to have Barry Norman. None of those people are there any more.”

Stratton admits in the book that he was naive in refusing to give a score on SBS’s The Movie Show to the controversial neo-Nazi drama Romper Stomper in 1992 because he feared it would encourage racist violence. His stand caused director Geoffrey Wright to charge up to him at the Venice Film Festival yelling “stay away from my film, you f---er”, and throw a glass of wine over him.

“I made a mistake in taking that particular approach because it just gave it more publicity,” he says. “It’s not a film without merit. I think Russell Crowe is terrific in it. I’ve watched it again, but I’m still convinced that it was a film that tended to encourage that sort of violence and racism.”

The bill for lunch at the Conservation Hut Cafe in Wentworth Falls.Credit: Sydney Morning Herald

After ordering a coffee each – 4½ stars for the cafe from Stratton, five stars for me – I ask what else he watches other than films. He says SBS news every night, Four Corners and Media Watch.

“I never got into TV series,” he says. “When Jane Campion made Top of the Lake, I thought, ‘I have to see this.’ Then I thought, ‘Come on Jane, this is padded, terribly padded. There are characters here that have nothing to do with the main plot.’”

Stratton felt the same about Todd Haynes’ mini-series Mildred Pierce, which he watched because he loves the book, the 1945 film of it, and star Kate Winslet. “Padded,” he says.

“The only television series that I watched that I thought had any merit was the black-and-white Ripley. That was beautifully shot. It was a bit padded but not too bad.”

Australia at the Movies, Allen & Unwin, $39.99, will be in bookstores from October 29.

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