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Editorial Reviews
In 1928, after years of struggles within the studio system, Erich von Stroheim found the opportunity to create his crowning achievement: a storybook romance of intoxicating beauty, counterbalanced with a frightfully grim tale of moral corruption. Gloria Swanson stars as an innocent convent girl who falls under the spell of a handsome prince (Walter Byron) on the eve of his marriage to a diabolical queen (Seena Owen). Queen Kelly might have been one of von Stroheim's greatest films had actress/producer Swanson not halted it in mid-production. Kino on video presents the critically acclaimed restoration of von Stroheim's ambitious epic, which incorporates many of the scenes (set within an African brothel) that caused Swanson to shut down the film. Also featured on this disc are rare outtakes, Swanson's alternate ending and a little seen TV performance by von Stroheim.
Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
43 of 49 people found the following review helpful
By Dave Clayton
Format:DVD|Amazon Verified Purchase
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.
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.
11 of 12 people found the following review helpful
A Kid's Review
Format:DVD
I was at Borders, looking for this musical called Good News, and another one called Dixiana, but I saw something sticking out on another shelf, and it was Queen Kelly! Normally I only like musicals, but remembered how much I enjoyed and Beyond the Rocks on TCM, so I bought it! And I was like wow! Swanson is good! Although sometimes it got boring, it was pretty good all together. I wish they would put Beyond the Rocks on DVD, the movie Gloria Swanson made with Rudolph Valentino. also, Greed. Greed is my favorite silent movie EVER. It is so amazing, and also directed by Erich von Stronheim.
15 of 18 people found the following review helpful
Format:VHS Tape
The great silent film QUEEN KELLY, is Swanson's most popular film, aside from SUNSET BOULEVARD.
Swanson plays Patricia Kelly, a naive and innocent convent girl, who catches the eye of a Prince (Walter Byron), when her underpants accidentally fall down. He falls in love with her, despite the fact that the demented and jealous Queen Regina (Seena Owen), is after the Prince herself.
The scene where Regina chases Kelly out of the palace, whip lashing and her feathered robe flaying, is truly memorable.
One of the most sought-after silents, this great tinted version is backed by a full orchestra soundtrack.
Most Recent Customer Reviews
5.0 out of 5 stars
This film is really a follow-up to another film.
Watching "Sunset Boulevard" one is aware of a film within the film; Gloria Swanson starring in a silent film that, I believe Eric Von Stroheim, playing her butler, actually... Read more
Published 5 days ago by William C. Young III
5.0 out of 5 stars
Jumping the gun
I think this would be more effective if you waited until AFTER I had received the item before asking me to review it.
Published 3 months ago by William W. Currie
4.0 out of 5 stars
Queen Kelly
For some inexplicable reason, Amazon has removed the rate-movie feature from the main product page. One must now write a review in order to rate a movie and generate... Read more
Published 24 months ago by Charles D. Fulton
5.0 out of 5 stars
Facinating, Unfinished Film by Erich Von Stronheim (and Gloria...
This is a most interesting unfinished film. Gloria Swanson was given money by Joseph Kennedy, her lover to produce this film. Read more
Published on October 18, 2009 by Lynn Ellingwood
5.0 out of 5 stars
PERFECT!!!!!
This is one of the best DVD restorations Kino has put out. The inclusion of the reconstructed ending and the Swanson ending are great. Read more
Published on April 2, 2009 by larryj1
5.0 out of 5 stars
Unbelievable
This film is unbelievable on many levels. First, I can't believe anyone would have trusted von Stroheim, consistently a quintessential "mad genius," to not break the financial... Read more
Published on August 20, 2007 by Jeremy D. Weinstein
5.0 out of 5 stars
A lesson in film history.
This is Director Eric Von Stroheim's last film, produced by it's star, Gloria Swanson. There is much to be learned from the commentaries and additional features on the deluxe Kino... Read more
Published on January 30, 2007 by J. Kara Russell
5.0 out of 5 stars
What might have been
Like just about all of the films directed by von Stroheim, this one too is only available today in a much-shortened form and not the way he intended it to be seen. Read more
Published on September 20, 2006 by Anyechka
5.0 out of 5 stars
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. Read more
Published on February 26, 2005 by Hiram Gomez Pardo
5.0 out of 5 stars
Fascinating Story!
I was just surfing the shelves at Borders today when I stumbled over Queen Kelly on DVD! I couldn't believe it. Read more
Published on August 15, 2003 by Joan Crawford
