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Queen Kelly is one of early Hollywood’s most controversial movies…its story is a cinematic journey of a production burdened by recurring misfortune and internal conflicts which is doomed to become the incomplete expression of a would-be silent classic. It’s excruciatingly long drawn-out saga starts in 1928, as a United Artists feature intended as a star vehicle for top silent screen actress of the day Gloria Swanson who had defected from Paramount to go independent. Joe Kennedy Sr, patriarch of the tragedy-soaked, almost self-destructive Kennedy family of jinked and fated politicians, comes into the film’s story at this juncture. In the late 1920s Kennedy shrewdly acquired a string of small movie studios which he consolidated into RKO (Radio-Keith-Orpheum) in 1928.
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Kennedy’s foray into the movie biz led to a meeting with Swanson and a three-year affair between the two. Joe was hoping to launch a successful career as a Hollywood film tycoon and agreed to finance Swanson’s Queen Kelly. Controversial auteur director Erich von Stroheim was brought in to write the original story and to direct, this was the start of everything going pear-shaped. Let loose with a big budget, Stroheim, an autocratic perfectionist by nature, dragged out the filming of what he intended to his personal masterpiece with constant reshoots and delays – amassing enough footage for a five-and-a-half hour epic, but having shot only just over one-third of the film’s scenario (‘Queen Kelly’, Silent Era, www.silentera.com).
With the movie still not finished and the Austrian-American director having drained more than $800,000 from the production budget, Stroheim was finally sacked. Filming done, this is where the machinations started getting really interesting. Swanson discovered that Kennedy has deceived her, instead of being an investor in the project Joe had actually loaned Gloria the capital, leaving Swanson wholly responsible for the loss! To try to recoup her money, Swanson tried to finish the disaster of a movie❇︎. After a savage round of editing, a sound version directed by Richard Bokeslawski with an alternate ending was released by Swanson’s own production company in Europe and South America in 1932. Stroheim, still holding the US rights to the production, had vetoed an American release (‘Erich von Stroheim’s Damned Queen: Queen Kelly’, Michael Koller, Senses of Cinema, August 2007, www.sensesofcinema.com).
Sunset Boulevard: American audiences finally got their first screen glimpse of Queen Kelly in a curious, twisted fashion some 20 years later. The film Sunset Boulevard (1950) reunited two of the original forces behind Queen Kelly, Swanson and Stroheim (as actor). Stroheim cheekily talked director Billy Wilder into using an excerpt from Queen Kelly in Sunset Boulevard, in which Swanson plays Norma Desmond, a forgotten silent film star. In a delicious irony the interspersed old footage from the doomed 1928 “classic” is presented as one of Desmond’s great silent films! The ensuing interest generated by Sunset Boulevard resulted eventually in a very belated second release of Queen Kelly in 1957.
In 1985 Kino International brought to the screen a third release of the much maligned and butchered Queen Kelly. The 1985 version—hyped as a “restored masterpiece” and “lost masterwork”—was based on Stroheim’s original script (IMDb, www.imdb.com), but of course remains incomplete as intended. Over the course of the production’s extended lifespan, four cinematographers, five directors (in addition to Stroheim) and three other writers worked on the uncompleted feature.
❇︎ timing also contributed to Queen Kelly’s failure…it was in production at the same time as ‘’talkie” movies were starting to make their inexorable rise ultimately to unparalleled popularity. Also, the Hays Code, recently introduced, insisted Stroheim make cuts to the movie’s raunchy content, which Stroheim defiantly and characteristically refused to do