It’s hard to avoid looking at Carl Schultz’s Goodbye Paradise in a certain light after the recent passing of its star Ray Barrett. Never a traditional leading man, Barrett proved to be an endearing larger-than-life character actor for more than half a century and this relatively unknown 1983 film - a rare opportunity for him to feature centre stage - is possibly his finest moment on screen. Barrett plays Michael Stacy, a rough-round-the-edges former Assistant Police Commissioner on the Gold Coast who’s fallen on hard times. He’s a careless alcoholic, prone to drunken displays of affection for women in public, especially the sweet Kate (Robyn Nevin), and lives in a seedy apartment sharing salacious quips with his pestering landlady. Out of the blue, he’s saved from the maelstrom of his rapid self-destruction by a proposition from an old friend, Senator McCredie (Don Pascoe). It seems like a relatively simple task: he wants his wayward daughter Kathy (Janet Scrivener), who Stacey was very fond of when she was just a child, found and returned to him.

Naturally, this mission proves to be anything but straightforward with various secret factions secretly at work to prevent the girl’s whereabouts from becoming known. From the scenic city’s underbelly a host of hardly trustworthy possible suitors, with recent connections to Kathy, emerge. Stacy finds himself unwittingly led down dark alleys of deception, many of them just enticements into a vulnerable position - not hard considering his regularly lubricated, quivering state - that spells danger to his physical well-being.

Despite the winning, laconic appeal of Barrett as this lovable loser, the actor’s greatest leg-up comes from a typically smart Bob Ellis screenplay (with able assist from Denny Lawrence) which uses an old technique – the first-person voiceover – to brilliant effect. Every caustic observation and internal cogitation comes pouring forth from Stacy’s mind with the feel of weathered, reckless street poetry; this is the wisdom of a man who’s been battered around by experience and glimpsed one too fallouts from the secret transactions taking place within the secret chambers of power.

Towards the end, Stacy apparently emerges from one of his fugue states in another movie altogether, caught in the crossfire of a scene that seems lifted directly from Platoon. Is he really dreaming or have the agents of subterfuge responsible for Kathy’s kidnapping become aligned with the military connections from Stacy’s past that seem to be rearing their heads again in all the wrong places? The tonal shift of this entire sequence throws you off course; it’s loud, brash, and seemingly subservient to a need to attract an overseas audience, or at the very least create an extravagant, over-the-top distraction just in case some of us were falling asleep. It feels forced and unnaturally separated from the tone that the film has taken great pains to establish up until then.

There are other occasional scenes that either date the film or appear plain loopy by today’s sensibilities, especially one that steers Stacy into a giant clinical glass structure which happens to be the home of wacked-out spiritualists who should have ‘Cult’ tattooed across their foreheads. He emerges from it carrying around a banana for a large chunk of the film, but despite these failed eccentric touches you keep coming back to the underlying strength of the screenplay; within it, we witness the gritty determination of Stacy to push back the tide of corruption with the force of his will and a laconic adherence to his own unique, bewilderingly naive sense of integrity. He’s a memorable centrepiece, perhaps calculatedly cartoonish in some subversive way but recognizably human. More than anything he’s a quintessentially Australian character too, in the forlorn but blackly humourous worldview and irony he inflicts upon those who stay within hearing range.

This isn’t on a par with Schultz’s best film, the austere, spellbinding period piece Careful, He Might Hear You, but it’s solid work and an impressive illustration of the director’s versatility considering both were released in the same calendar year. This is a film desperately in need of re-discovery via, what would be, a long-awaited and fully justified DVD release.

Review by David O’Connell

Director: Carl Schultz
Screenwriters: Bob Ellis, Denny Lawrence
Cast: Ray Barrett, Paul Chubb, Guy Doleman, Kate Fitzpatrick, Lex Marinos, Robyn Nevin