Queen Kelly

            A glorious new reconstruction and 4K restoration of Erich von Stroheim unfinished 1929 epic Queen Kelly. This was a dream project actress Gloria Swanson and her lover at the time Joseph Kennedy (who was bankrolling it) brought to director Erich von Stroheim (Foolish Wives, Greed), thinking him a perfect fit for some of the excesses of the plot. Unfortunately, Stroheim’s own excesses caused the budget to skyrocket and some of the later shots in a bordello were so outrageous (and would never have been allowed by the censors) it caused Swanson to contact Kennedy complaining “the director is a madman.”  Stroheim was fired after three months and they cut their losses by editing together what they had. The whole second half of the film was deleted.

            The plot of what might have been a five-hour film was that of an innocent convent girl Kitty Kelly (Swanson) whose flirtations to Prince “Wildman” Wolfram (Walter Byron) causes him to kidnap her in the middle of the night and bring her to the castle laying out a feast and bottles of champagne. However, the ferociously jealous Queen Regina V (Seena Owen), drunkenly wandering the castle with her fluffy white cat, about to marry Wolfram, discovers Kelly and literally whips her out of the castle. That scene is vintage Stroheim in its gratuitous perversity.

            The second half of the film (now reconstructed with some newly found footage and stills is when Kitty is sent to her dying aunt (Florence Gibson) in Dar-es-Salaam, German East Africa. There she is forced into marriage to the hideous, syphilitic Jan (Tully Marshall), who runs the local brothel. The breaking point for Swanson was when Stroheim filmed Jan dribbling tobacco juice into her hand.

             The great irony in this debacle was when Stroheim and Swanson were reunited for Billy Wilder’s corrosively brilliant Sunset Boulevard they inserted (at Stroheim’s suggestion) a shot of Swanson and William Holden watching a projected screening of Queen Kelly.

            Queen Kelly is still a beautiful, truly mad film. One can only imagine what might have been.

            The film is currently playing at The Film Forum (209 W. Houston Street).