Queen Kelly

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.

This is the movie that was supposed to cement Gloria Swanson's position as one of Tinseltown's greatest and most popular actresses, as well as make her and her production company a major player in Hollywood. It was supposed to rescue Eric von Stroheim from the oblivion in which his career as a director had seemed to have landed him after a succession of costly box office (but critically acclaimed) failures. It was supposed to prove once and for all that Joseph Kennedy (Pres. JFK's father) was indeed a wizard at movie production. But the movie ultimately proved a disaster for just about everyone associated with it. Stroheim was fired after too many cost and schedule overruns; Kennedy abandoned the project after realizing, among other things, that he may have to invest some of his own money into the production; and Swanson couldn't afford to throw any more of her time or her money at the making of this movie. The script's original ending was never filmed (or, if it was, that footage soon disappeared). The movie was never released to American theaters and had a short run in Europe in 1931 after an alternate ending directed by Ms. Swanson herself was appended to it. Kino acquired the rights to the movie in 1985 and restored it, using the so-called Swanson ending while also releasing the film with another alternate ending. The ending presented in this version is not the Swanson ending and incorporates still images where movie footage is unavailable, much as the restored version of the 1954 "A Star Is Born" does. In any event, the "Queen Kelly" you have here presents a Gloria Swanson in her prime, giving one of her best performances ("Sunset Boulevard" notwithstanding). Enough footage remains of Stroheim's mastery at directing (and he was a master, if not a very good manager of finances and schedules) to give you a good sense of what could have been had the industry been more adept at overlooking his foibles and embracing his talents.

It finally becomes clear where a lot of the money went when you see those sets -- they are Old European Beau Epoch and over the top even for that era. Seena Owen was the spitting image of early (pre-Twenties) Art Dolls and Lamps (if you've seen any you know what I mean!). Her frothing at the mouth during the whipping scene(s) and the plot twists of Kelly being (1) forced by her dying Aunt to marry someone who simply bought her, and (2) becoming a Madam were why this got only four stars from me. Even for the overly moralistic melodramatic Von Stroheim, this was all a bit much. However, some of the imagery invoked through the sets and little scenarios were very good at conveying the ideas -- half way through I realized one didn't even need to read the dialog/scene stills to know what was being conveyed. Too bad this wasn't completed - it would have made a great trilogy piece set (Good Girl; Bad Girl; Redemption). I'm not a Film Historian but instead have had a life-long love of movies, costume, sets, good stories, and learning from that what life may have been like (or looked like, or, at least, what artists wanted you to think it looked like) and, especially for Silent Movies, what the moral climate was.

When I bought this DVD (November 2020), recent reviews were saying there was no sound—though there is supposed to be a "full orchestral score." Unfortunately I did not look at these reviews until I tried to play my own copy last night. The DVD is worthless—not just the sound, but everything about it indicates a badly made, pirated copy. Unfortunately it is too late for me to return it.

The visual quality is poor. Even worse, there is throughout the film an unnecessary, distracting and ugly logo emblazoned in the lower right of the screen, as shown in the photo I am sharing. Also, there is supposed to be an orchestral soundtrack to the film but there is none.

The extras here include a poor quality video intro by Madame Swanson herself ... It alone is worth the price of the DVD.What an amazing imagination Stroheim had ... A unique visionary fetishist

"still wonderful, and no dialogue"

VORBEMERKUNG: Die folgende Rezension bezieht sich auf die DVD, die im Jahre 2003 von Kino on Video produziert worden ist (›Deluxe Collector’s Edition‹). Zum Zeitpunkt dieser Rezension dürfte diese Version die beste verfügbare sein (die in der 2008 erschienenen französischen Stroheim-Box des Anbieters mk2 enthaltene Version ist eine Übernahme der Kino-on-Video-Fassung).Erich von Stroheim (1885-1957) zählt zweifellos zu den großen Meistern der Stummfilmära. Sein Einfluss auf die Filmkunst ist kaum zu überschätzen. Sein bisweilen krasser Naturalismus und seine Bilderfindungsgabe haben zahllose Filmemacher inspiriert. Der in Wien geborene Stroheim entstammt einer jüdischen Fabrikantenfamilie. Um sein Glück zu machen, ging Erich Stroheim in die USA und verlieh sich im Zuge der Einwanderungsprozedur selbst das Adelsprädikat ›von‹. Er wurde US-Bürger, aber mit Österreich und dem alten Europa der Zeit vor 1914 verband ihn eine leidenschaftliche Hassliebe, die sich deutlich in vielen seiner Filme niederschlug.Stroheim scheiterte letztlich in Hollywood. Der eine Grund war seine ästhetische Maßlosigkeit, die Budgetvorgaben souverän ignorierte. Der andere Grund lag in Stroheims naturalistischer Poetik begründet. Seine Gesellschaftskritik und sein oft extrem ätzender Sarkasmus fand in Szenen Ausdruck, die die Grenzen des seinerzeit Zeigbaren vielfach weit überschritten und die Selbstzensur der Studios auf den Plan riefen.»Queen Kelly« von 1928 ist das letzte Projekt, das Stroheim bis zu einem gewissen Punkt unabhängig verfolgen konnte (danach kam nur noch ein kurzer Einsatz als Regisseur des Tonfilms »Walking down Broadway«, der aber keine nennenswerten Spuren hinterlassen hat). Der von den großen Studios bereits geschasste Stroheim wurde 1928 von der Schauspielerin Gloria Swanson engagiert, die als unabhängige Produzentin ihren eigenen Starruhm mit ambitionierten Filmprojekten vermarkten wollte. Im Hintergrund fungierte ihr damaliger Lebensgefährte Joseph P. Kennedy – der Vater des späteren Präsidenten – als Geldgeber. Auch Swansons Ambitionen scheiterten im Übrigen in Hollywood, das in den 1920er Jahren zu einer reinen Männerdomäne geworden war, in der Frauen in Leitungsfunktionen keinen Platz mehr finden konnten.Swanson ließ Stroheim für »Queen Kelly« zunächst freie Hand. Er konnte einen eigenen Stoff realisieren. Das erste Drittel des Films – etwa 85 Minuten – konnte fast komplett abgedreht werden. Vom zweiten, in Afrika spielenden Drittel existieren aufregende Fragmente, die aber auch erkennbar werden lassen, dass Stroheim wieder einmal auf die Zensur keinerlei Rücksicht nahm. Die Produktion wurde von Swanson gestoppt und Stroheim gefeuert. Ausschlaggebend dürften aber ökonomische Gründe gewesen sein. Die sehr aufwändige Produktion fand in der Zeit des rapiden Übergangs zum Tonfilm statt. Die Aussicht, mit einem teuer produzierten Stummfilm einen großen (finanziellen) Erfolg zu erzielen, schwand gewissermaßen von Tag zu Tag mehr dahin.Swanson versuchte, das verfügbare Material des ersten Filmdrittels mit einem Filmschluss zu versehen, um das Ganze so doch noch auf den Markt zu bringen. Das Unternehmen scheiterte (der abrupte Schluss, für den Greg Toland Szenen inszenierte, ist im Übrigen reichlich lächerlich). Die Swanson-Version wurde aber hier und da (etwa im TV) durchaus gezeigt. Erst 1985 gelang es Dennis Doros, auch das Material der in Afrika spielenden Szenen zu integrieren und die bis heute gültige vollständigste »Queen Kelly«-Version herzustellen. Sie findet sich auf dieser DVD.Der Film lässt erkennen, dass Stroheim 1928 ganz auf der Höhe der Zeit agierte. »Queen Kelly« ist auch in dieser fragmentarischen Form ein Meisterwerk des späten Stummfilms. Jede Szene offenbart ein hohes Maß an Intelligenz, nichts ist überflüssig. Wenn Stroheim sich viel Zeit nimmt, wie etwa für die erste Begegnung zwischen Patricia Kelly und Prinz Wolfram, dann dient dies dazu, die zahlreichen menschlichen Nuancen auszuloten. Stroheim war, wie diese und andere Szenen zeigen, ein großer Psychologe.Die DVD bietet neben dem Film zahlreiche Extras. Es gibt einen Audiokommentar des Stroheim-Biografen Richard Koszarski. Dazu kommen Outtakes zu »Queen Kelly«, das ›Swanson Ending‹ sowie eine sehr aufschlussreiche Einführung in den Film von Swanson, die vermutlich in den 1960er Jahren für das TV produziert worden ist. Weiterhin gibt es Audio Clips, Fotogalerien und Einblicke in schriftliche Dokumente. Für die Stroheim-Fans findet sich außerdem ein Dossier zu dem Film »Merry-Go-Round« (1922), von dem Stroheim ebenfalls gefeuert wurde.Das sehr reichhaltige Zusatzmaterial ist mit auf die DVD gequetscht, die auch den Film enthält. Entsprechend eingeschränkt sind Bild- und Tonqualität. Für die Zukunft ist eine bessere Präsentation des gleichen Materials auf Blu-ray sehr wünschenswert. Die vorliegende DVD ist nicht auf Regionalcode 1 beschränkt, also auch auf den handelsüblichen europäischen DVD-Playern abspielbar.Ein letzter Hinweis: Wer »Queen Kelly« kennt und auch über die Umstände der Produktion halbwegs Bescheid weiß, der wird Billy Wilders großartigen Film »Sunset Boulevard / Boulevard der Dämmerung« (1950) überhaupt erst so richtig zu schätzen wissen.

Un monument à voir et à revoir .On ne s'en lasse pas ...Et bien-sûr, ne pas manquer de découvrir et revoir Boulevard du Crépuscule de Billy Wilder, avec Gloria Swanson et Eric von Stroheim quarante ans plus tard ...

Goût pour le cinéma ancien