David Stratton, the legendary Australian film critic best known for appearing alongside Margaret Pomeranz on SBS movie review show The Movie Show and the later ABC incarnation of the show At The Movies, has died at the age of 85.
In a statement issued, his family reported that Stratton died peacefully at his home in the Blue Mountains: “David’s passion for film, commitment to Australian cinema, and generous spirit touched countless lives.
“He was adored as a husband, father, grand and great grandfather and admired friend.
“David’s family would like to express their heartfelt gratitude for the overwhelming support from friends, colleagues, and the public recently and across his lifetime.”
A life defined by his passion for film
Born in 1939 in Trowbridge, England, Stratton was a self-taught man who never finished high school.
He moved to Australia in his early 20s and brought his passion for film with him. As a young man in a new country, he very quickly got caught up in public fights against film censorship in Australia, which led to becoming director of the Sydney Film Festival in 1966.
“My tenure as director coincided with the Australian film revival, so I was able to show the first films of Peter Weir, Gillian Armstrong, Fred Schepisi, Phillip Noyce and all those people, becoming friends with them in the process,” Stratton told The Guardian in a late 2023 interview. “It was a wonderfully rich period here but the 70s was a fantastic time for cinema internationally too.”
He stayed in his role as festival director for almost 20 years, stepping down in 1983. By that time he was three years into working at the then-new TV broadcaster SBS (it began TV transmission in 1979). He worked at the channel initially as a film consultant, introducing Sunday evening movies and the Movie of the Week. His on-air role changed in 1986 when he was joined on a dedicated film criticism show with then-TV producer Margaret Pomeranz.
The two are collectively known by Australians as ‘David and Margaret’ and it is a partnership that spanned nearly 30 years on air together.
“I still argue with David,” Pomeranz told Mediaweek in a 2016 interview. “I talk to him every couple of days. He’s a great friend. You don’t have that length of association without… It doesn’t just cut off. We’re very fond of one another. If I were in trouble, I’d ring David to ask him to help me. I think he’d do the same for me. We’ve both done it for one another.”
When asked about his relationship with Pomeranz, Stratton was very David Stratton when asked about his former colleague. In an interview with SBS he commented: “We’re not close friends. We’re very different and we live a long way from each other, so we couldn’t be further away. We occasionally run into each other at preview screenings. We might occasionally have lunch. Something like that. But we’re not intimate friends and never were.”
When pushed, he did concede that he was in fact friends with her: “Well, it is. It is a friendship, yeah.”
Recently, David Stratton was seen in public in late July appearing at a Sydney performance of Zachary Ruane and Alexei Toliopoulos‘ play Refused Classification. The two comedians portrayed David and Margaret.
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Stratton’s life and passion for film was captured in the theatrical documentary ‘David Stratton: A Cinematic Life.’
Stratton served as a film critic for The Australian for 33 years. He filed his last review on 29 December, 2023. It was for Woody Allen’s Coup de Chance. He began that review with a defence of reviewing an Allen movie: “I am a firm believer that a work of art should be seen for what it is, regardless of the creator’s morals. Chinatown (1974) is a great movie, and will always be, whatever Roman Polanski may have done off-screen.”
Stratton was arguing for the right to view a filmmakers work until the end.