Queen Kelly at Speed Cinema
New 4K Reconstruction
Queen Kelly
Directed by Erich von Stroheim
Saturday, January 31, 3 pm | BUY TICKETS
$12 | $8 Speed members
Queen Kelly should have been a dream collaboration — a glamorous world-famous movie star (Gloria Swanson) and her financier lover (Joseph P. Kennedy) hire 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 — which was shot in sequence — was shut down by Swanson after just a few of the scandalous African sequences were filmed. The unfinished Queen Kelly — like Erich von Stroheim’s desecrated Greed — became Hollywood legend. Basing his reconstruction on von Stroheim’s original scripts, Milestone Films’ Dennis Doros has employed multiple techniques to recreate 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, “Wild” Prince Wolfram (Walter Byron). When the dissolute prince encounters an innocent but flirtatious convent girl, Patricia Kelly (Gloria Swanson), he falls in love. Desperate to see her before his upcoming wedding to the Queen, Wolfram kidnaps Kelly and brings her to his rooms in the palace. When the Queen discovers the lovers, she whips the young girl and throws her out into the night, clad only in her night gown. 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 girl is shocked to find herself in a seedy bordello. On her deathbed, Kelly’s aunt begs her niece to wed the brothel’s syphilitic owner, Jan Vryheid (Tully Marshall). 1929, U.S., 4K DCP, 105 minutes.
On the Restoration
In 1985, when Kino International (with Dennis Doros as the novice archivist) released the first “new” edition of Queen Kelly, it was promoted as a “restoration of Erich von Stroheim’s lost masterwork.” Recognizing that the restoration of a film that was never completed is an impossibility, Doros calls his 2025 work on Queen Kelly, a “reconstruction” — an improved re-imagining of what von Stroheim’s completed film could have looked like.
Award-winning composer Eli Denson’s beautiful new score adds to the film’s romance, humor, and drama.
Milestone is grateful for the participation of George Eastman Museum (primary source), the Library of Congress National Audio-Visual Conservation Center, the Harry Ransom Center, the Margaret Herrick Library, Paramount Pictures, and the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum for providing the original nitrate 35mm materials, photographs, and papers to used create this new version. Milestone also thanks Metropolis Post in New York for digitally timing, stabilizing, and removing dust and scratches.
