Orry-Kelly - Women He's Undressed

Seen at the Palace Nova cinema in Adelaide CBD

Bea says: We had been wanting to see this film, about a local hero from our current home town of Kiama, and had been hoping to see it there too.  But alas, we have no cinema here and vague plans to put on a screening seemed to be coming to nothing.

So on a chilly, grey afternoon, when we had time to kill after lunch with friends and before a flight home from Adelaide, we headed down to the East End to see it.

Done in a very sub-Baz Luhrmann style, this docu-drama won't be everyone's cup of tea, but it does entertainingly relate the colourful and largely unknown (to us at least) life of Orry Kelly, boy from Kiama, who became costume designer to the stars during the real Hollywood heyday of the 30s until about the 70s or so.  Every leading lady, and many supporting actresses you can think of were dressed by him at one time or another and as a sewing enthusiast myself I loved the focus on how he worked with their individual faces and shapes, and also emphasised the stories they were portraying.

Like most of us, Kelly's life had ups and downs - he was gay during a period when it was illegal and in conservative Hollywood (as opposed to the stage theatre world he had begun in) kept very much in the closet.  Relationships foundered under the strict management of the studios, and Kelly, like many of the era, used drink, probably drugs, and gambled excessively, losing his fortune, getting sacked, getting hired again, but pretty much maintaining his unique and brilliant work throughout with a few lulls for time in rehab.

Rather a lot was made by the film of his relationship as a young man with a big Hollywood star, firmly in the closet; and I also felt the film's title was rather oddly, and inappropriately, titillating - surely it should more accurately be "women he's dressed"?  The story was strong enough, and interesting enough, not really to need these two elements played upon quite so much.

A very interesting watch - highly recommended, an interesting alternative Australian hero to the usual suspects.
***1/2

Cecil says: What I did like about this film was the reminder of how many great films are never shown anymore. All those wonderful black and white movies with great storylines and classic actors of their day just never get shown anymore. There's no TV channel showing Turner Classics as in the USA and the old Saturday afternoon matinees on UK TV - which I never wanted to watch when Grandstand was my preference - are long consigned to history.

This film made me want to get to see all the old movies from the time when Orry Kelly was designing clothes. And fortunately our local cinema in Nowra does do a weekly double bill of oldies, so I must start going.

I also learnt something about the old film studios of those early days of cinema. I hadn't realised that Warner Brothers' early films focused on grittier, more day-to-day characters, whereas Paramount and MGM (?) went for the more glamorous, high-society settings. Makes me want to get hold of a list of those Warner Brothers films and try to see them all.

What I didn't like was the very staged start and end of the film, with Orry-Kelly rowing his boat on placid seas. It felt too much like a set designed for stage rather than screen and just didn't work for me. Why couldn't they have filmed that on real water in Kiama Harbour, or even Wollongong?

The story was captivating, though, and the time passed very quickly.

***