David Stratton

In this much-delayed final instalment of David Stratton’s trilogy on Australian cinema, the use of the word ‘ultimate’ in the book’s subtitle is no hyperbole. Stratton has been a film critic, television presenter, historian, and lecturer for sixty years, and during that time he has been assiduously recording information on the countless home-grown films he has seen. His knowledge of the local film industry is formidable and possibly peerless.

The tasteful title of this autobiography echoes the story once told of how the ebullient Italian producer Filippo Del Guidice performed the same disservice to J. Arthur Rank and survived to become a force in the British film industry. David Stratton, after looking sideways in a Venetian toilet, never looked back – despite Fellini’s understandable choler.

The end of the decade seems an appropriate time for a re-assessment of the revival of Australian cinema, since the beginning of the seventies can be taken as the time when it struggled towards life. Somewhere between the two Burstall films, Two Thousand Weeks (1968) and Alvin Purple (1973), there took place the various stirrings of conscience, consciousness, initiative, and enterprise that led to something over one hundred and fifty films in the next ten years. David Stratton’s book lists one-hundred-and-twenty-eight films, although different listings have discovered more, and he is also at pains to pay appropriate tribute to the pioneering efforts of Burstall.