Erich von Stroheim’s
QUEEN KELLY

Friday, January 16 – Thursday, January 22

U.S. PREMIERE OF NEW DIGITAL RECONSTRUCTION AND 4K RESTORATION

ALSO PLAYING THIS WEEK: SUNSET BLVD., STARRING SWANSON AND VON STROHEIM

U.S., 1929
Directed by Erich von Stroheim
Starring Gloria Swanson, Walter Byron, Seena Owen, Tully Marshall
Approx. 101 min. 

It should have been a dream collaboration: a glamorous world-famous movie star Gloria Swanson and her financier lover Joseph P. Kennedy hired the most celebrated director of the time Erich von Stroheim to make a groundbreaking independent film. Instead, QUEEN KELLY was canceled mid-production. The movie was shot chronologically and after filming just a few of the scandalous African sequences, Swanson, the film’s star and producer, shut it down. This unfinished film became Hollywood legend. Basing his new reconstruction on von Stroheim’s original scripts, Milestone Films’ Dennis Doros has recreated the film’s dénouement.

QUEEN KELLY opens in the imaginary European country of Cobourg-Nassau, sometime before the first World War, where the vain and cruel Queen Regina V (Seena Owen) obsesses over her feckless fiancé, Prince “Wild” Wolfram (Walter Byron). When the dissolute prince encounters an innocent but flirtatious convent girl, Patricia Kelly (Swanson), he falls in love. Desperate to see her before his upcoming wedding to the Queen, he kidnaps Kelly and brings her to his rooms in the palace. When the Queen discovers the lovers, she whips the nightgowned girl and throws her out into the night. After an unsuccessful suicide attempt, Kelly returns to the convent, where she receives a telegram, summoning her to the bedside of her dying aunt (Florence Gibson) in Dar-es-Salaam, German East Africa. There, the innocent young girl is shocked to find herself in a seedy bordello. On her deathbed, Kelly’s aunt begs her niece to wed the syphilitic brothel owner, Jan (Tully Marshall).

This new reconstruction is dedicated to Kino Lorber’s former owner, Donald Krim, who produced and financed Doros’ first work on QUEEN KELLY forty years ago.

A MILESTONE FILMS/KINO LORBER RELEASE

Trailer

Reviews

“The 1929 silent film returns in a shimmering, sensitively scored restoration that brings out the lurid and the romantic in Erich von Stroheim’s story of orphan-meets-prince.”
– Nicolas Rapold, The New York Times
Read the full review

“This new restoration may just be everything that Swanson dreamed of for her lovechild QUEEN KELLY.”
 – The Guardian

“One of Stroheim’s most provocative works.”
 – Dave Kehr, Chicago Reader