Queen Kelly (no 74)

by Allan Fish

(USA 1928 101m) DVD1

Majesty my foot!

p  Joseph Kennedy, Gloria Swanson  d/w  Erich Von Stroheim  ph  Gordon Pollock, Paul Ivano, Ben Reynolds  ed  Viola Lawrence  m  Adolf Tandler  art  Harry Miles, Richard Day 

Gloria Swanson (Patricia Kelly), Walter Byron (Prince Wolfram), Seena Owen (Queen Regina V), Tully Marshall (Jan Vryheid),

Just to think of Erich Von Stroheim’s uncompleted final film as a director makes one think over two decades after its abandonment to Sunset Boulevard.  There Swanson and Von Stroheim appeared together, the latter playing the one-time director, one-time husband, and now dog-like retainer to Norma Desmond.  In it, of course, they show a film, and it’s Queen Kelly, and the thought that comes to my mind every time is whose idea it was to use the film.  Swanson’s?  Von Stroheim’s?  Wilder’s?  Probably Billy’s, though Swanson and, more importantly, Von Stroheim would not have failed to notice the irony.  After all, when directing him in Five Graves to Cairo Wilder was sheepish directing a man he felt was ten years ahead of his time, and Von Stroheim replied “twenty.”

            The film concerns a young convent girl who becomes besotted with a crown prince, in front of whom her knickers inexplicably drop to the floor, and who comes on the receiving end of the psychotic temper of the debauched queen, winds up in a brothel in Africa where her aunt lays dying, and winds up its madam.  It’s pure tosh, of course, but this always was a film of set pieces.  Deep down, there must have been reservations that it would ever be completed; Von Stroheim’s extravagances were become legendary, spending thousands of dollars filming sequences that would never get past the censor.  Finally, Swanson herself called a halt to proceedings.  There was no truth to the talk of a fight between Swanson and Von Stroheim, it was a reluctant closing down, but in the harsh climate of the day perhaps a necessary one.  It served as the final statement of the most ironic of filmmakers, and at least in being stopped before it got to the end, it was saved the inevitable butchery that befell his earlier masterpieces, for there’s no way the original five hour script was going to be released untouched. 

            Taking the set pieces one by one, however, reveals some of the most audacious and stunning sequences in American silent cinema.  The opening sequence in itself has passed into legend, with an imperiously brazen Seena Owen quite obviously naked in bed, barely covering her not inconsiderable breasts with a small pet dog, wandering out au naturel onto the balcony so her guards can cop an eyeful and getting insanely jealous at her intended’s looking at anything young and female.  It’s a jealousy that finally erupts like Vesuvius when, upon emerging from her champagne bath – she may be only seen drinking it, and yet one can almost imagine her bathing in it, and Von Stroheim ordering the best Dom Perignon for the scene – she finds her intended enjoying an intimate supper with Swanson and proceeds to literally whip her out of the palace like a particularly vicious lion tamer.  Equally feted were the sequence where the hero and heroine meet, with the accident with the bloomers, the sheer unlikely nature of the meeting of a group of convent girls and a regimental troupe arguably topped by their doing so past a row of very conspicuous and very Von Stroheim blossom trees.  And then, how could we forget the brothel wedding ceremony with Swanson given a mosquito net as a wedding veil.

            Like all Von Stroheim’s films, it’s ravishingly photographed, designed to the n^th degree, and superbly acted.  Swanson may be too old to convince fully as a young orphan, yet she never looked more stunning than in that candlelit altar scene, Owen is truly delirious as the mad queen, and Marshall is a lecherous, dirty old man to end them all as the truly nasty Jan.  It may only survive as Act One of the piece, but it’s one third of a movie is better than most people’s completed magnum opus.  Georges Sadoul went so far as to say it was “perhaps Von Stroheim’s most perfect work, if not his richest.”