by FilmInk Staff

When David Stratton was asked by his publisher to write a book about his favourite movies, his first impulse was to turn the idea down.

Perhaps Australia’s most beloved and well-known film critic, David Stratton has famously consumed close to thirty thousand movies since he started cinema going as a boy growing up in England in the 1940s and ‘50s. His cherished top picks can be counted, he told FilmInk, ‘in the hundreds’.

“It just seemed too hard to reduce the list to a manageable number,” he said.

“Then Covid arrived,” Stratton explained. “I then thought, ‘this could be quite fun’… I spent most of last year’s lockdown revisiting a lot of my favourite movies.”

Written in between his regular gigs as a reviewer, My Favourite Movies took about a year to complete. “If it does well, I might write a sequel,” Stratton said.

Designed as a viewer’s guide, it contains mini essays on one hundred and eleven movies, chosen from every decade since the 1920s up until the late Naughties.

Anyone familiar with Stratton’s work in TV and print will recognise the style he uses in the new book. Warm, erudite, dryly humorous, he reviews each film with great sensitivity to style while carefully teasing out a relevant fact or fascinating behind the scenes story. He includes a capsule summary on the director’s career and a detailed (and spoiler heavy) synopsis and makes an argument for each film’s role in world cinema history.

For those readers familiar with such titles as Don’t Look Now (Nic Roeg, 1973, UK), Cria cuervos (Carlos Saura, 1975, Spain), In a Lonely Place (Nicholas Ray, USA, 1950) or Z (Costa-Gavras, France, 1969), the book tells us once more why these pictures have always been special. For movie-goers eager to get into unfamiliar territory, Stratton’s list is a splendid start.

Unsurprisingly, he brings attention to near forgotten eccentric gems like Went the Day Well? (Cavalcanti, 1942, UK) or Milos Forman’s first American film, the under celebrated Taking Off (1971). There are quite a few surprises. Michael Mann’s superb but still little seen thriller Manhunter (1986) makes the cut.

There are eleven Australian films in the book, including Picnic at Hanging Rock (Peter Weir, 1975), Breaker Morant (Bruce Beresford, 1980) and Animal Kingdom (David Michôd, 2010), and the essays on these are amongst the best in the book; a further reminder that Stratton has always been an enthusiastic supporter of home-grown cinema.

Tell us how you worked out what you were going to write about?

“In order to finalise the selection, I re-watched every film that I wrote about in the book and a lot more besides. Originally, it was supposed to be 101 films; which seems to be the magic number for this kind of thing. When I got to 101, I thought, ‘I can’t stop here’, because there were some really important films that I had to include.

“It could have easily been 200 films. I would have loved to have put in Point Blank (John Boorman, 1967, USA) or Round Midnight (Bertrand Tavernier, 1986, France-USA).”

What rules did you set to give the book a structure?

“I made it difficult for myself by confining it to one film per director. Otherwise, I could have filled it with, you know Hitchcock films, or any of my favourite directors… But that gave me some self-imposed problems. How do you pick your favourite Hawks? Hitchcock? Ford?”

The Hitchcock you picked was North by Northwest (1958, USA).

“Yes. I’m not saying that’s Hitchcock’s best, because it isn’t. But it’s my favourite, not only because it’s very entertaining and I’m a big Cary Grant fan… but also, because of the circumstances in which I first saw it.”

Yes, one of the charms of the book is that you include a note with each film about when you first saw the picture. It makes the tone very personal, a bit like a diary. What do you remember about that night in Bath, England in February 1960, when you saw North by Northwest? [Ed. Stratton was twenty-years old at the time].

“I was with a very nice girl, and we had a lovely evening… those sorts of things, those memories [helped me in the selection].”

What do you think is Hitchcock’s best, by the way?

“Well, Shadow of a Doubt (1943, USA) is very good, Notorious (1946, USA), Rear Window (1954, USA), there are a lot of contenders and that’s why I [went in the direction I did].”

The method of selection means you emerge with quite a few unexpected choices… say Hawks’ The Big Sleep (1946, USA) instead of Red River (1948), Ford’s Grapes of Wrath (1940, USA) rather than The Searchers (1956, USA), Billy Wilder’s The Apartment (1960, USA) over Double Indemnity (1944, USA) or Sunset Bvld (1950, USA).

“Sure, and I’m happy about that. It was only when I was nearly finished with the book that I looked back and realised that it is loaded with films that I saw in my late teens.

“That was a time of freedom. I was away from my parents. It was the first time in my life I could see anything and everything I wanted seven days a week… it was a great time.”

Another biographical element you have included are those moments when you first met a famous director… like lunch with Spielberg in Spain in 1975 when he presented Jaws at the San Sebastian Festival, or your friendships with Wim Wenders (Kings of the Road, 1976) and Peter Weir. You include a mention of your first ‘celebrity’ interview: with Peter Bogdanovich in 1972, when he came here to promote The Last Picture Show (1971, USA). But you don’t write how Bogdanovich bit your head off after you gently suggested that he was influenced by John Ford [which, of course, he was]…

“[Laughs] Well, yes I did leave a few things out.”

In seventy plus years of film going you have been eyewitness to extraordinary disruption and innovation. But to focus on criticism for a moment…?

“There have been tremendous changes in every area to do with film. The opportunities for commentary on film have been reduced and of course the film industry itself has changed dramatically. I wonder sometimes whether the cinema will survive.”

You started your career in a way, when you established a film society back in England. You took on the directorship of the Sydney Film Festival in your mid-twenties in 1966 and retired from that role in 1983. Core values at that time in your activities seem to be advancing film as an Art and expanding awareness of International cinema. Do you see the Streamers taking up that legacy, curating films so they can reach a new audience?

“I don’t know whether they have any curatorial approach, do they? [Laughs]. To be honest I don’t use the streaming services much. Though I do see things to keep up. Just recently I saw Rebecca Hall’s film Passing. Which is a wonderful film. It’s really, really good. But those [sorts of experiences] are few and far between.”

What was a career highlight for you as a critic?

David Stratton A Cinematic Life (Sally Aitken, 2017), to go to Cannes with it, was one of the most exciting things. At first, I was a bit uncomfortable [making the film because of its personal nature]. But I really think Sally did a terrific job.

“To be perfectly honest, if I look back at what I am most pleased about in my career, it has nothing to do with writing. It was [my work at] SBS.

“When SBS started in 1980, I was given the chance to program feature films. Out of that, I think we showed some remarkable pictures. I was keen to show classic films, which we did. We always showed them in the correct aspect ratio, without cuts or modifications.

“I think the films we showed in the twenty years I was doing that, introduced a very wide audience to some great pictures by some of the world’s best filmmakers.

“It was the chance to discover so many films. For so many people, it was their first chance to see an Ozu film, or Kurosawa, or a Bergman. It was like a film society on television.”

My Favourite Movies is available now thru Allen & Unwin

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