Queen Kelly

In Imperial Germany, the mad Queen Regina V (Seena Owen) is engaged to her playboy cousin, Prince Wolfram (Walter Byron), who doesn't love her. After a night of drunken carousing, Wolfram is punished by Regina, who forces him to practice extra drills with his squadron in the hot sun. During the drills, Wolfram encounters a group of Catholic orphan girls from a nearby convent. When the girls curtsy, the panties of one of them, Patricia Kelly (Gloria Swanson), falls to her ankles and Wolfram laughs at her. She angrily throws the panties at Wolfram and he stuffs them in his pocket and rides away. On the eve of his wedding to Regina, Wolfram goes to the convent and sets fire to it, then kidnaps Patricia during the confusion. They go back to the palace for a midnight supper, but Regina catches them making love and she whips Patricia out of the palace, then sends Wolfram to military prison.

After an unsuccessful suicide attempt, Patricia goes to German East Africa to comfort her ill aunt (Sylvia Ashton), whom she learns is the proprietor of a dance hall-bordello. On her deathbed, the aunt coerces Patricia into marrying an elderly rich man named Jan (Tully Marshall), who turns out to be a degenerate cripple. After her aunt dies, Patricia becomes the bordello's new madam and Jan is killed during a bar fight. Wolfram is released from prison and he tracks down Patricia in Africa and marries her. When Regina is assassinated, Wolfram is called back to Germany to become king and he brings Patricia with him, who becomes "Queen Kelly."

The extant truncated version of QUEEN KELLY is a very good film that might have been von Stroheim's magnum opus, had he been allowed to finish it. According to Swanson's autobiography, she truly believed the film would have been her crowning achievement, and was thrilled with the rushes for the European scenes, but became "nauseated" by the "rank, sordid and ugly" African scenes. When von Stroheim instructed Tully Marshall, who was playing the lecherous Jan, to dribble tobacco juice on Kelly's hand, Swanson had a fit and ordered her agent/financier/lover Joseph P. Kennedy to halt production. The 90 or so minutes of footage which had already been shot in 1928 (comprising about one-third of the entire film) sat on the shelf and was never released in the US, since talkies were starting to become popular. In 1932, the film was released in Europe and South America, with a tacked-on ending directed by Swanson herself in which Kelly drowns and the Prince kills himself. The film was reconstructed in 1985 according to von Stroheim's original script, using stills, titles, and all of the remaining footage. The result is tantalizing, but as expected, frustrating all the same.

The scenes in Germany are virtually intact, with the opulence of the sets and costumes only highlighting the decadence of the characters, but apart from the death of Kelly's aunt and the wedding to Jan, all of the African sequences are missing, and one can only imagine the twisted beauty that von Stroheim would have wrought from the "filthy" bordello scenes that Swanson objected to. Still, what remains is fascinating and quintessential von Stroheim: The mad queen taking a bath in champagne; the nuns covering their faces in shame after Kelly throws her panties at the prince and he lovingly sniffs them; the famous glowing close- up of Kelly's face surrounded by candles, which was excerpted in SUNSET BOULEVARD (1950) when "Norma Desmond" watches one of her old films; the queen frothing at the mouth and whipping Kelly; and the incredible deathbed wedding scene featuring the drooling, lip-smackingly repulsive Jan. Like von Stroheim's other mutilated masterpieces, QUEEN KELLY demonstrates just how far ahead of his time he was and makes one marvel in amazement that he was able to get away with as much as he did. (Adult situations.) leave a comment