QUEEN KELLY (1928) B/W "silent" 101m dir: Erich von Stroheim

w/Gloria Swanson, Walter Byron, Seena Owen, Sidney Bracey, William von Brincken

From Variety's review of the film, a 96 minute reconstruction done in 1985: "Queen Kelly, which Erich von Stroheim originally wrote as The Swamp, was the director's eighth silent picture and was undertaken at the behest of Gloria Swanson. Best guess is that Stroheim's full scenario would have played for at least five hours' running time. Film was in production less than three months, from 1 November 1928 to 21 January 1929, when Swanson, finally fed up with her director's excesses, told financier Joseph Kennedy to shut it down, after an expenditure of $800,000.

"Since Queen Kelly was shot in sequence, what exists of it plays very smoothly and coherently up through its arbitrary, but dramatically valid, conclusion. Set in the sort of fin-de-siecle Ruritanian principality usually favored by the director, tale presents the mad young Queen Regina (Seena Owen) forcing the playboy Prince Wolfram (Walter Byron) into a royal marriage.

"Far from resigned to a life of amorous activity, Wolfram encounters a troup of convent girls while on cavalry drill in the country and, in a legendary scene, meets Kitty Kelly (Gloria Swanson).

"As planned by the director, film would have continued ever-deeper into grand melodrama until, coming full circle, Kitty would have truly become Queen Kelly along with Wolfram, displacing Regina on the throne.

"Version of the film released minimally in Europe and South America in the early 1930s ended with Kitty successfully committing suicide. Footage of her in a bordello in German East Africa was not discovered until 1963. The music score by Adolph Tandler, which was written for Swanson's 1931-21 version, was discovered on a nitrate soundtrack for use in this edition."

From Georges Sadoul's Dictionary of Films: "In the late Twenties Gloria Swanson decided to produce her own films; her financial backer was Joseph Kennedy, later American ambassador to London, whose son was to become President of the USA. Stroheim was commissioned to write and direct Queen Kelly and the script was passed by the Hays Office. According to Gloria Swanson, '(Stroheim) agreed to stick to this, which he did for a while. But then we got to the scene in the brothel --- well, in the script it was a dance hall, but Stroheim had other ideas, and proceeded to spend a fortune --- of my money --- shooting stuff he knew would never get into the finished picture ... this was sheer waste and enraged me, so we halted the picture to see what could be done. By that time sound was coming in, and we had shot only the first third of the film, so while we were considering what to do I made very quickly with the English director Edmund Goulding a talkie, The Trespasser, and then somehow Queen Kelly just stayed on the shelf. Finally I myself directed a sort of patched-up last scene (the Prince discovers Kelly's drowned corpse and kills himself) to tie up the story and it was shown a little in Europe and South America, in places where they didn't yet have talking apparatus and that was that. A year or two before his death [in 1957] Stroheim and I talked about it and wondered if we couldn't do something with it, but neither of us had time.' Stroheim disowned Swanson's release version but said, 'Any stories of friction between myself and Gloria Swanson were entirely fictitious.' However, he justifiably complained that the editing was atrocious: scenes he had intended to run three feet ran twenty feet in the release version in order to pad out the film.

"In 1964 an additional twenty minute fragment came to light. This shows Kelly and the rich aunt in the brothel in Africa with a bespectacled Negro priest giving the last sacrament as whores snigger; and also Kelly's marriage, with a mosquito net for a veil, to the old degenerate.

"Despite its mutilation Queen Kelly is perhaps Stroheim's most perfect work of not his richest. Striking sequences: the Queen's champagne bath in a fantastic bath tub; the convent girls; the Prince's arrival; Kelly's panties falling around her feet; the jealous Queen in fur-trimmed, black velvet negligee whipping Kelly out of the palace."