A performative exploration of Australia’s own Orry-Kelly, perhaps most infamously known as Cary Grant’s lover, Women He’s Undressed is a playful look at the man behind the costumes worn by Marilyn Monroe, Betty Davis, Humphrey Bogart, Rosalind Russell, and Errol Flynn, amongst other legends of Hollywood’s Golden Age. The film’s story is told via an electrifying mix of first-person interviews, performances of Orry-Kelly’s letters, and archival materials, including clips from his films Some Like It Hot, The Maltese Falcon, Les Girls, and Arsenic and Old Lace.
The film’s charms exist in the performative elements contextualized amongst the film’s interviewees. Director Gillian Armstrong (known for her narrative films Little Women and Oscar and Lucinda) paints a picture partially routed in national pride, about a small town boy from rural New South Wales who makes good in Hollywood. The fragmented nature of the narrative presents the film as less of an enigma than its opening would suggest; what promises to be one boy’s journey (in the spirit of Velvet Goldmine‘s exploration of the evolution of the queer via the lens of a fictionalized Oscar Wilde) grows into a limited first-hand biography.
Apparently Grant — his “roommate” — had blocked an Orry-Kelly autobiography, making for the picture somewhat incomplete and thus an autobiographical link between Kelly and his work is opined about via historians, living legends and film scholars in the picture’s talking head segments. First hand Jane Fonda and Angela Lansbury paint knowledge of Kelly, while the film has its most fun discussing Some Like It Hot as critic Leonard Maltin also provides essential context.
As far as the documentary is concerned Orry-Kelly’s legacy lives on, winning three Oscars as one of the most influential costume designers of Hollywood’s golden years. The film paints a complete, playful portrait of Orry-Kelly’s life and times, struggling to make a go of it in Hollywood as well as managing the egos of starlets and studio bosses. Throughout the process, Armstrong is confronted by subjects in a struggle to understand how and why she will go about making this documentary (one asks if her interest in purely in the that of national pride).
While Anderson creates a compelling case as to why we should honor Orry-Kelly’s legacy, Women He’s Undressed occasionally veers into the territory of national tribute that appears a little thinner than you might assume. Perhaps this is the achievement of superb production and costume design — Women He’s Undressed is a tongue-and-cheek biography that can’t reach greatness without the complete picture.
Women He’s Undressed screened at TIFF and opens on July 29. See the trailer above.
