Before the silent film era was even over, Erich von Stroheim had become infamous as the medium’s first and foremost megalo-megaphone-maniac, an uncompromising riding-crop impresario who delivered impossible five-hour final cuts and ran every film’s production as though he was erecting an imperial society from scratch. Spectacle was everything, and budgets were for bean-counters. In Hollywood, this sort of bullgoose artiste never lasted long, and for von Stroheim the last of several breaking points was Queen Kelly (1929), which remains if not a lost film, then a lost one.
First, only a truncated version using maybe a fifth of the director’s scenario—of which, after exposing 3,000 hours of film, he was only one-third through before the plug was pulled—was released in Europe and South America, but never in the United States. Then, a 1985 restoration by Dennis Doros for Kino International (now Kino Lorber) came out, which restored the “German East African” brothel sequence that star/producer Gloria Swanson hated, plus some stock footage and stills. Now, Doros and Milestone Films return with a further “reimagining,” incorporating more title cards, stills and even production sketches, to flesh out the curvy outline, at least, of von Stroheim’s lurid original story.
Every von Stroheim film is a shadow of a grander concept, but they’re also—except for 1924’s Greed—all delirious masquerade soirées, always set in a fin de siècle Mitteleuropa and populated with wild debauchees of every social class. Queen Kelly has—swirling around Swanson’s risibly unlikely teen orphan—a mad-drunk queen (Seena Owen, often nearly nude, even before the whip comes out), her drunken prince fiancée (Walter Byron), the heroine’s dying brothel-madam aunt (Sylvia Ashton), a leering miscreant (Tully Marshall) the virginal maiden is forced to marry, and a swarming undercast of court hangers-on, leering whores and nutty souses. Virtually every beat in the plot would have, given the chance, gotten the film banned in the U.S. for decades to come. Of course, the money is all on the screen—von Stroheim knew how to gild the lily and fill the frame—and, as the hot bulb of silent stardom at the movie’s center, Swanson was gorgeous in a witchy way movies haven’t seen much since. Her weird diva presence rhymes perfectly with the director’s wild excesses; in fact, as an autumnal artifact from the fading days of roaring ‘20s libertinism, just as talkies took over and the Depression began, Queen Kelly ultimately makes a hot-to-handle case for von Stroheim being his era’s formative and most subversive constructor of camp. Where’s he been? Prost!
Queen Kelly screens this evening, January 18, and throughout next week, at Film Forum.
