Goodbye Paradise: 'Paradise is youth'

A memorable piece of romantic narration brings the subtext to the surface and the film to a close. The idea of an older man’s longing for the pure beauty of a young woman is pretty standard in hard-boiled American detective fiction, but here it’s given a touch of literary grace, to elevate the emotions. Stacey has been resisting temptations all through the movie, unless they involve alcohol. There are many references to the Book of Genesis – including snakes and pieces of fruit. Stacey is thus a kind of fallen angel in the Garden of Eden. Saving Cathy is his bid for redemption.

His final joke, speaking into the banana, is because he has found out the banana conceals a listening device.

Goodbye Paradise synopsis

On Queensland’s Gold Coast in the early 1980s, a disgraced former cop, Michael Stacey (Ray Barrett), sets out to find a missing girl, the daughter of a senior politician. Stacey is down on his luck and desperate for a drink. His ex-wife has left him, he misses his dog Somare, and the publisher cancels his book about police corruption. He plunges into the Gold Coast’s nightmarish world of corruption, sex, violence, cult religion and dirty politics. He gets beaten up, finds and loses the girl and stumbles upon an unlikely plot for a military coup. People keep dying around him and he must continually resist the temptations put before him. Surviving in Surfer’s Paradise is not easy.

Goodbye Paradise curator's notes

Goodbye Paradise is an odd but compelling attempt at an Australian film noir – part political satire, part existential romance, part philosophical allegory. Ray Barrett gives one of the best performances of his long career as the whisky-sodden ex-deputy Police Commissioner who’s trying for one last grab at redemption. His world-weary Raymond Chandler-style narration, co-written by Bob Ellis and Denny Lawrence, is one of the film’s highlights, establishing a comic but rueful tone.

The film was made during the long and controversial years of Joh Bjelke-Petersen’s National Party government in Queensland, and the script is full of topical references that may now seem difficult to believe. In fact, there were strong secessionist sympathies in Queensland, and controversial schemes to search for oil on the Great Barrier Reef. Even so, the film’s subplot about a political coup was never quite credible, even as satire. What still works well is the film’s evocative picture of the Gold Coast as paradise lost – a sleazy fun park, full of gaudy symbols (bananas and pineapples everywhere), tawdry politics and bus tours of old ladies having a sing along. The film has many great lines, but one of the best is: 'This town is what Australians have instead of an afterlife’. Ray Barrett’s final soliloquy, shown in clip 3, is a superb rounding off of the theme – that paradise is youth, and everyone must eventually say goodbye to it.

Notes by Paul Byrnes

Education notes

This clip shows Michael Stacey (Ray Barrett) buying a golliwog for his goddaughter, Kathy (Janet Scrivener), whom he then meets at an outdoor cafe. Young people are sitting at the surrounding tables and a Salvation Army band plays in the background. After Kathy leaves, the clip cuts to a shot of Stacey walking with his dog on the beach. Dawn breaks and he 'signs off’ on a satirical note by speaking into a banana that contains a listening device. The character of Stacey provides a voice-over narration throughout.

Educational value points

• In the film Goodbye Paradise Michael Stacey, a disgraced ex-Deputy Police Commissioner, retires to the Gold Coast to write a memoir exposing police corruption. While there, he is drawn into a search for his missing goddaughter, Kathy, and stumbles into an attempted coup. The film tapped into the then widespread but unproven claims of police corruption in Queensland. In 1982, it won the Australian Film Institute (AFI) Award for Best Original Screenplay.

• The film uses the conventions of the film noir genre. In keeping with this genre, Goodbye Paradise is a detective story with a first-person narration, a specific urban setting in which corruption is rife, and a lone male protagonist who, through his investigation (in this case the search for the missing Kathy), uncovers a sinister plot. In addition it borrows from the highly stylised visual elements of the genre, using a night scene, flashing neon lights, lighting that emphasises shadow and the play of light, and distancing camera shots filmed through windows from above, with few close-ups.

• Stacey is based on the ‘hard-boiled’ (tough and cynical) detective of the film noir and crime genres. Stacey’s character is cynical, wise-cracking and tarnished and finds himself beset by forces outside his control. This relationship is emphasised by positioning Stacey in front of a poster of actor Humphrey Bogart, who created the archetypal film noir detective hero. However, this stereotype is also subverted through Stacey’s deliberate self-parody, such as toasting Kathy with a milkshake rather than whisky and speaking into a banana.

• The voice-over is another device often used in crime and film noir genre films. In Goodbye Paradise the main protagonist’s point of view is presented in voice-over, with Stacey conveying his subjective thoughts, recollections and ideas. Stacey’s laconic narration establishes the world-weary tone of the film, something also associated with the hard-boiled detective genre.

• The Gold Coast provides the urban landscape of gaudy nightclubs, neon strips and real estate developments through which Stacey moves. The film presents the Gold Coast as a tawdry world, 'the strange bright place Australians went to instead of dying’ as Stacey puts it, where the young are seduced by drugs and prostitution.

• Actor Ray Barrett’s performance as the jaded, laconic Stacey is considered one of his best and won him the 1982 AFI Award for Best Actor. Barrett appeared in stage reviews before moving to England in the 1960s, where he was a popular leading man in theatre and in television series such as The Troubleshooters. Since returning to Australia in 1976 he has worked extensively in the local film and television industry. He won AFI Awards for Best Supporting Actor for roles in The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith (1977) and Hotel Sorrento (1995).

Education notes provided by The Learning Federation and Education Services Australia