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Queen Kelly Customer Reviews (1 - 3 of 6 Reviews)
Von Stroheim to the Max
One of the most audacious in jokes in the history of American movies occurs in Billy Wilder's Sunset Boulevard when Norma Desmond (Gloria Swanson) shows Joe Gillis (William Holden) a silent film being projected by her onetime director-husband and now butler, Max von Mayerling (Erich von Stroheim). But the film they are watching, as few viewers then or now would realize, is Queen Kelly, a 1929 production starring Swanson and actually directed by von Stroheim. The director was, of course, never Swanson's paramour any more than Swanson was a real life Norma Desmond. But this movie was the last to be released with von Stroheim's name on the credits as director. He made a sound film for Fox, released as Hello Sister, but the only copy I have seen listed no director, and it would appear that some thankless studio drudges shot additional scenes after the studio trashed most of von Stroheim's work.
Von Stroheim's career might well have been invented by another offspring of the fading Austro-Hungarian Empire, Franz Kafka. Born in Vienna, the son of a Jewish hat manufacturer, he emigrated to the United States as a young man and passed himself off in Hollywood as the scion of an Austrian aristocratic family. Although he is often remembered today as the director of Greed, an adaptation of the novel McTeague by Frank Norris, which he photographed mainly on location in San Francisco and Death Valley, von Stroheim remained as much a spiritual inhabitant of Central Europe as did another quite different émigré director-Ernst Lubitsch. There the similarity ended. Both directors benefited from a Hollywood vogue for vehicles with a pre-World War I setting, but where Lubitsch looked back to the vanished glory of Wilhelmine Germany in The Student Prince in Old Heidelberg (1926), von Stroheim delighted in stripping away the pomp and circumstance of alt Wien, figuratively and literally, in Merry-Go-Round and The Wedding March.
Von Stroheim had a basic scenario that he recycled from Merry-Go-Round to Wedding March by way of The Merry Widow, one in which a titled debauchee falls in love with a commoner. In Queen Kelly, he used this device once more, but pumped it up to the max. In this movie, the depraved nobleman is Prince "Wild" Wolfram (Walter Byron) and the girl the orphan Patricia Kelly (Gloria Swanson), who has been raised in a Catholic convent. Not content to merely reproduce the Hapsburg Empire inside a Hollywood studio, von Stroheim this time invented a Central European monarchy of his own, Kronberg, ruled by the sadistic, lascivious Queen Regina V (Seena Owen). When Regina finds Kelly in Wolfram's apartments, she whips the girl out of the palace and sends Wolfram, her own fiancé, to prison.
At this point, von Stroheim sends his heroine to hell-to a brothel in German East Africa presided over by a dying aunt who forces the girl to marry a real monster of lust, the wealthy, crippled planter Jan Vreyhed (Tully Marshall). (Only a part of this sequence was shot before Swanson called a halt to the shooting, and the remainder of the film as made available here has been reconstructed from photos and script materials by Denis Doros.) Like Alfred Hitchcock's imaginative universe, von Stroheim's is a bestiary: its inhabitants are either vicious, cunning predators or their prey. In his Phenomenology of the Spirit, G.W.F. Hegel wrote of a "spiritual animal kingdom," but von Stroheim may have gone a step farther in depicting a spiritual food chain ruled at the top by characters like Regina or Jan, lording it over the meek of the earth.
Great art sometimes thrives off the obsessions of the artist, an effect that seems more conspicuous in the cinema than elsewhere. Although the names of Hitchcock, Luis Buñuel, Ingmar Bergman, and Robert Bresson all come to mind, von Stroheim probably went farther in this direction than any comparable figure in movie history. According to an anecdote Richard Koszarski repeats in his audio commentary, when Irving Thalberg complained about the numerous rushes devoted to documenting Baron Sadowa's collection of shoes in The Merry Widow, von Stroheim haughtily explained the Baron was a foot fetishist. "You're a footage fetishist!" Thalberg supposedly retorted. Whether the quip be authentic or not, there is more than a grain of truth in it. Wasn't there a grandiosely self-destructive artistic passion in planning a movie that would have run some five hours, as Queen Kelly would have had it been completed according to von Stroheim's intensions?
Quite apart from the virtual impossibility of a film of that length being produced by a Hollywood studio and exhibited in commercial theaters-as von Stroheim well knew-the real question is much more: who could have endured watching it? The African scenes in Queen Kelly are among the most oppressive I have ever viewed in a movie. Even if the action did culminate in Kelly's being reunited with Prince Wolfram, returning to Kronberg, and then ascending the throne, who could have swallowed such a denouement after suffering through what had preceded it? At the end of such a metaphorical journey through the desert, might we not have found ourselves confronting an infernal panorama like that which McTeague faces at the end of Greed? Had not Von Stroheim doomed his characters to perish in a Death Valley of celluloid?
Queen Kelly is a damaged but imposing monument to the art of the film. Kino Video has done itself proud-and done us all a great favor-in producing this DVD. In addition to Koszarski's informative commentary, the disk includes two endings-Swanson's and the reconstructed one-as well as scenes from Merry-Go-Round, audio interviews with various people, among them Billy Wilder, a 1952 TV appearance by von Stroheim, and, not least of all, a TV appearance by Swanson in which she discusses the making of Queen Kelly.
From the excel virtue to the decay!
Erik von Stroheim once more proved he was the Wunderkind of his generation in this exquisite and extravagant, daring and mature script. A Covent girl is swept off her feet buy a roguish prince who will send her to live in East Africa where her aunt regents a brothel. As you can guess or imagine the whispering comments originated in that age, I only can remind that clever statement of Nicolas Maquiavello: The half of the sin is the scandal.
More Historical than Artistic Significance
Eric Von Stroheim (1885-1957) was among the silent era's most visionary, artistically ambitious directors; Gloria Swanson (1897-1983) was among the screen's first "divas" and one of the silent era's greatest stars. With Swanson's lover Joe Kennedy (father of John, Robert and Ted) acting as money man, Von Stroheim and Swanson teamed to create a film that both believed would be crowing achievement of their careers: QUEEN KELLY.
Less than a third of the script was filmed when Swanson called Kennedy and demanded that Von Stroheim be fired. He was, and in his absence Swanson filmed several scenes intended to round out the story line and make the film fit for release. In doing so she reckoned without Von Stroheim, who had cannily held copyright and who flatly refused to permit distribution--and as the battle wore on sound began to roar, making the film less commercially viable with every passing day. Swanson was eventually able to release QUEEN KELLY in Europe, but it generated little interest and was soon withdrawn. It would not be seen in America until after Von Stroheim's death. It would be Von Stroheim's last major work as a director and it would effectively end Swanson's film career for a decade or more.
In the interval the reputation of QUEEN KELLY began to grow. It was, many declared, a lost masterpiece much like Von Stroheim's legendary GREED. And when it at last became widely available it leaped onto every critic and buff's short list of "important" silent movies. But time has a way of smoothing out peaks and valleys. Seen today, QUEEN KELLY is interesting--but only for what it might have been, not for what it actually is.
The story is distinctly odd. Prince Wolfram (Walter Byron) is betrothed to Queen Regina (Seena Owen), a vicious, half-mad, and intensely jealous despot he despises. While riding in the country he comes upon a group of orphans that includes Kitty Kelly (Gloria Swanson), who makes an impression on him by loosing her bloomers and then angrily throwing them in his face when he laughs at her. Determined to see her again, the Prince stages a fire in the convent and under cover of smoke kidnaps Kitty and takes her to the palace, where she soon surrenders to his charms. But there is hell to pay when Queen Regina discovers the girl, and before you know it Prince Wolfram is in the dungeon and Kitty has, of all things, inherited a brothel in Africa. Will they find each other again?
It is basically at this point that the film footage ends. The Kino release attempts to finish out the story with a handful of stills and title cards, and true enough we do learn the outcome of the story--but it is a very academic proposition, to say the very least, and although it seems to have a certain promise it is very hard to say what Stroheim might have done with the rest of the story. Hopefully more than he was able to do with the first third! For while the existing footage is not bad, it hardly compares with either Stroheim or Swanson at their finest.
Indeed, Swanson seems extremely miscast in the title role. It is utterly impossible to accept her as an innocent orphan raised in a convent. Much more interesting is Seena Owen as the evil Queen Regina, who is sullen, dangerous, and utterly fascinating; in the film's most memorable scene, in which Kitty is chased through the palace by the whip-weilding Queen, it is Owen who dominates the scene, not Swanson. As for Von Stroheim, he is clearly building a series of visual motifs that reference sex, most notably in his use of candles, fires, and smoke--but with the film suddenly unfinished it is very difficult to know to what end he intended it.
This is really a film for silent film connoisseurs, and even they may find it frustrating to the point of annoyance. The Kino print is very good, but there is no getting around the fact that the film itself ends at the very point at which our interest in both plot and characters begins to build. Recommended, but as a curiosity only. Trivia: some twenty years later Swanson and Von Stroheim co-starred in the legendary SUNSET BLVD--and the film that silent star Norma Desmond watches is none other QUEEN KELLY.
GFT, Amazon Reviewer
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