On its 1982 release, Goodbye Paradise earned the AFI Award for Best Actor and Best Screenplay. Ray Barrett plays Michael Stacey, a disgraced former Queensland assistant police commissioner, in a film that never received the recognition it deserved due to the sensitivity of the time. (It was released prior to the Fitzgerald Inquiry into police corruption in Queensland.) Stacey, recently kicked out of the force, retires in a drunken fog to the back blocks of the glamorous Gold Coast to write a tell-all memoir. But greater forces are at work and Stacey is drawn into the search for a senator's daughter who has disappeared with a famous artwork. While Stacey, the alcoholic, guilt-ridden Catholic, begins a quest, he cannot escape his past and shady associates from his military service in Malaysia.

The brilliance of Bob Ellis' screenplay and the skepticism of Barrett's character result in some truly memorable lines. Other equally memorable performances come from Lex 'The Swine' Marinos, as the proprietor of a bus line specialising in erotic tours for pensioners. This is a brand-new 35mm print of a lost and unappreciated Aussie crime classic.