Queen Kelly **** (1929, Gloria Swanson, Walter Byron, Seena Owen) – Classic Movie Review 1981

Best known nowadays, if at all, for the excerpt of it seen in her 1950 comeback movie triumph Sunset Blvd., Queen Kelly (1929) is Gloria Swanson’s famous silent film. Alas, it ended up in an interesting if truncated and muddled mess and unfortunately had the effect of killing off the behind-the-camera career of its legendary director Erich Von Stroheim.

He had shot four hours of film and just a third of the story when producer Swanson fired him, recut the film and added music with a score by Adolph Tandler and a newly shot arbitrary ending. But, like with Orson Welles’s similarly troubled The Magnificent Ambersons, enough remains to guess at the power of what might have been.

But the real problem was that the film was being shot in the middle of the industry’s transition to sound. Unknown to Von Stroheim, Swanson and financier Joseph Kennedy started discussing ways to save the project. They considered adding a music and effects soundtrack, and even thought to film and insert some singing sequences. But Kennedy went for the least costly option, which was released on New Year’s Day 1929.

Swanson plays a convent girl called Patricia ‘Kitty’ Kelly, who is abducted and seduced into an affair with Prince Wolfram (Walter Byron) when her knickers fall accidentally. Soon his mad fiancée, Queen Regina V of Kronberg (Seena Owen), is chasing ‘Kitty’ Kelly out of the palace with a whip before being sent off to a brothel in East Africa where she earns the name ‘Queen Kelly’.  

Tantalising scenes like this make the unsatisfactory whole worthwhile, and the decadent happenings and baroque look of the piece can’t help but fascinate. Nobody can say it isn’t lively, stylish and wildly extravagant. This is the kind of plot you just don’t have in movies nowadays!

Erich Von Stroheim gets sole credit as director and shares the writing credit with Marion Ainslee. But other uncredited directors are Richard Boleslawski, Edmund Goulding, Irving Thalberg and Sam Wood. And other uncredited writers are Delmer Daves, Edmund Goulding and Paul L Stein.

The Swanson Version runs only 75 minutes but the 1985 Restored Version runs 101 minutes (and the DVD has more than three hours of bonus material footage), justifying its claim to be a restored silent movie masterpiece.

Von Stroheim carried on working as an actor. Poignantly, Von Stroheim acts with Swanson in Sunset Sunset Blvd. He hadn’t talked to Swanson in 20 years and despised ‘That damned butler role’, probably his most high-profile film part. Director Billy Wilder recalled that it was Von Stroheim’s idea to use the clip from Queen Kelly in Sunset Blvd. as a way of ‘art imitating life’. When Swanson’s Norma Desmond watches one of her old films, it’s Queen Kelly, Stroheim’s Max Von Mayerling serves as projectionist and it is later revealed that he was the silent movie director who discovered Norma.

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© Derek Winnert 2014 Classic Movie Review 1981

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