SUNDAY'S RECOMMENDED DOUBLE FEATURE with Sunset Boulevard

It 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 was shot in sequence and after filming just a few of the scandalous African sequences, Gloria Swanson, the film’s star and producer, shut it down. This unfinished film — like Erich von Stroheim’s desecrated Greed —became Hollywood legend. Basing his reconstruction on von Stroheim’s original scripts, 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 (Walter Byron), Prince “Wild” Wolfram. 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, 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).

Restoration Note:

In 1985, when Kino International (with Dennis Doros as the neophyte 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 the 2025 release of Queen Kelly an improved re-imagining of what von Stroheim’s film could have looked like. 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 used to create this new version. Milestone also thanks Metropolis Post in New York for digitally timing, stabilizing, and removing dust and scratches.