Doc Corner: 'Women He's Undressed' Reveals Hollywood Couture
Tuesday, July 26, 2016 at 11:30AM Glenn here. Each Tuesday we bring you reviews and features on documentaries from theatres, festivals, and on demand.
Gillian Armstrong is nearly as prolific as a documentarian as she is a dramatic filmmaker. While the likes of her “Seven Years On” series (an Australian 7 Up), her Bob Dylan concert doc Hard to Handle, or the true crime murder mystery of an interior design queen in Unfolding Florence aren’t as well-known as her collaborations with Judy Davis, Cate Blanchett, Mel Gibson, and Winona Ryder, they are eclectic and passionate works nonetheless. As she said in her interview with Jose last year at Toronto, “there’s a different art to making documentaries” and unlike many other directors who split their time between mediums, her documentaries do feel distinctly unique from her other work and yet equally essential.
Her latest non-fiction work is Women He’s Undressed, a peek behind the velvet curtain at Orry-Kelly, a costume designer from Hollywood’s golden age. Armstrong posits that he is a virtual unknown – a claim a deliciously acidic Ann Roth, one of the doc’s more entertaining talking heads, doesn’t have a bar of – including in his home country of Australia. What we do know is that he was gay, secretly dated Cary Grant, Bette Davis was fiercely loyal to him, and that he had a hand in some the greatest films of all time from Casablanca to 42nd Street, An American in Paris to The Letter and many more. You don’t win three Academy Awards without being a little bit special!
[Jane Fonda, Marilyn Monroe's breasts and more...]
Armstrong utilizes a structure device wherein actor Darren Gilshenan (an Australian character actor, but likely unknown to most) portrays the man himself with Deborah Kennedy as his mother, Florence, in stylized, narrated flashbacks. It’s daggy to say the least, but allows for at least a few moments of delight among what could have otherwise been little more than a typical career overview. No woman he dresses shall make love in giant, billowy dressing gowns!
A bevy of costume designers including the aforementioned Roth, Colleen Atwood, Kym Barrett, Michael Wilkinson, and Catherine Martin (who beat Kelly’s record of most Oscared Australian ever with four) sit alongside Leonard Maltin, Angela Lansbury and a scene-stealing Jane Fonda who has the film’s best moment during a lengthy sequence discussing Orry-Kelly’s eye-popping designs for Marilyn Monroe on Some Like It Hot.
I’d go to watch that movie just to see Marilyn Monroe in that scene.
And I’m not gay.
I’d like to [motorboat sounds] those breasts, though.
I began thinking about Women He’s Undressed in context to other fashion documentaries, of which there are many. August sees the 21st anniversary of the greatest of them all, Douglas Keeve’s Unzipped, which follows the creation of Isaac Mizrahi’s 1994 fall collection. Cinematic in the best ways – clearly cribbing off of Madonna: Truth or Dare with its black and white, biting queer comedy, and celebrity guests – it remains a hoot and with its eye remaining firmly on the fashion. I would also give high marks to Unzipped's sister doc, Robert Leacock's Catwalk (they even cross-over at one point), Pierre Thoretton’s L’amour fou, Richard Press’ Bill Cunningham New York, and Albert Maysles’ Iris. Women He’s Undressed doesn’t scale the heights of those, thanks in part to at least being a bit too sidetracked by the private life of the subject rather than the clothes, but it is nonetheless a briskly paced, deliciously entertaining, and thoughtfully respectful look at the life of somebody who all too easily could have been consigned to a life in the history books and little more.
Release: A brief theatrical release in LA on the 29th of July followed by a VOD and iTunes release on the 9th of August.
Oscar chances: The Academy have, as far as I am aware, never nominated a documentary about fashion. And we’ve spoken plenty about their bizarre aversion to docs about Hollywood. I would expect the light-hearted tone of Women He’s Undressed to mean that isn’t about the change, but it’d certainly be a swell treat.
Reader Comments (8)
This sounds like a delight! He created so many classic looks both complex and simple. I'll definitely be checking this out.
I don't think the "acted" portion of this doc works at all really but there is SO MUCH GOOD DISH as well as fascinating costume design moments.
And also, the costumes he made for Tony Curtis(Josephine)
and Jack Lemmon(Daphne) for Some Like it Hot
were so incredible that Marilyn stole one designed for Jack.
I could live without the acted portions, but I had a great time watching it.
I keep remembering the Irma la Douce black and green combination. Genius.
The acted portions are, as I say, daggy in the extreme and don't really add all that much, but I get that it adds a light-heartedness to the film's tone that at least somewhat sets it apart. I don't entirely begrudge it.
YES! Saw this in the cinema late last year. Loved it. Especially the motorboating.
Dirt on Cary Grant, plzzzzzzzzzzz!!! Lol
Just caught this on Netflix and really liked it... I actually enjoyed the acted "recreations" sprinkled throughout (Darren Gilshenan was ridiculously charming) though the format takes some getting used to and the early portions of the doc relied on them so heavily, that they tended to have less impact when used as sparingly as they were in the later portions of his life.
One point of confusion for me: Was this film based on the unpublished memoir featured in the film's coda? If so, it gives more weight to the recreations if many of the performed soliloquies came straight from Orry's pen, though that could have been made more explicit.... If the "recreations" are just a narrative device by Gillian Armstrong and Katherine Thompson to lend more immediacy or context to Orry and were scripted specifically for the film, they do begin to fall apart in the later passages of the film...
For me, the decision to return to Orry's relationship to Cary Grant throughout the film quickly became diminishing returns. The film half of the film treated the Orry/Grant relationship with some objectivity. It never came off as a great love affair, just a relationship between two pragmatic, career-minded gay men that ended when one became a big star during a period where being gay was career suicide... But the film started treating it with more reverence as it went on and that quasi-reconnection toward the end of Orry's life and the business with the funeral seemed like a stretch to give their relationship stronger meaning and the film a more sensational ending. It didn't work for me...
But Orry's life story and those costumes!