“David’s infectious passion for film and deep commitment to Australian cinema were unrivalled in this country,” the statement read.<\/p>\n
Stratton’s family has asked for privacy in the wake of his death, but issued a special request to the movie-going public:<\/p>\n
“[We] invite everyone to celebrate David’s remarkable life and legacy by watching their favourite movie, or David’s favourite movie of all time \u2014 Singin’ In the Rain.”<\/p>\n
Details of a public memorial service will be announced in the near future.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Stratton and his on-screen partner, Margaret Pomeranz, hosted film review shows together for 28 years. (Randwick City Council)<\/p>\n
A ‘ten-pound Pom’ made good<\/p>\n
Born in England in 1939, Stratton was sent to the countryside at a very young age to live with his grandmother, while his father fought in WW II.<\/p>\n
It was there that he developed a love of cinema \u2014 with his grandmother taking him along to see movies when he was just a toddler.<\/p>\n
“When my father came home from the war and we moved away from my grandmother’s house, I was deprived of movie-going very abruptly,” he told the Sydney Morning Herald<\/a> in 2019.<\/p>\n “I’d been going to the movies from about the age of two or three until I reached about six, and then suddenly [there were] no movies in my life. That was quite a shock.”<\/p>\n His love of cinema never left him, however, and by his late teens he had developed a love of foreign films and founded a film society in his home town.<\/p>\n In 1963, he moved to Australia \u2014 a so-called “ten-pound Pom” under the scheme created by the Chifley government as part of Labor’s “populate or perish” drive.<\/p>\n Just three years later he became director of the Sydney Film Festival, a job he landed due to his reputation for fighting film censorship, and held until 1983.<\/p>\n In 2014, it was revealed that, during this time, Stratton was under surveillance by ASIO<\/a>, due to the festival’s policy of showing films from the USSR and other countries not always on friendly terms with Australia.<\/p>\n From 1984 until 2004, he co-hosted The Movie Show alongside Margaret Pomeranz on SBS, using a similar format to the one popularised by US film critics Roger Ebert and Gene Siskel.<\/p>\n Loading…<\/p>\n The pair became a beloved part of Australian film culture, and became regular viewing for audiences keen to watch them offer their opinions \u2014 even if those same viewers had no intention of watching the films in question.<\/p>\n Not everyone was a fan, however.<\/p>\n After he gave Geoffrey Wright’s Australian neo-Nazi drama Romper Stomper a famously negative review in 1992<\/a> \u2014 refusing to rate the film, even as Pomeranz gave it four-and-a-half stars \u2014 the director accosted him at the Venice Film Festival, throwing a glass of wine at him.<\/p>\n