Erich von Stroheim's QUEEN KELLY (1929)
So, my hot take of the month is that Gloria Swanson circa 1928/29... va-va-VOOM. What a total beauty, smokeshow, 12 out of 10 whatever you want to put it. That out of the way? Ok. The film: even in "Reconstructed" form with a heck of a lot of intertitles to wrap it up in the last five minutes: an absolutely magnificent melodrama (and Swanson was a great damn actor)! Queen Kelly is marred by the fact that it remains partially incomplete - since Erich von Stroheim was fired by the major and very powerful star (both in terms of talent and box office, more on her in a moment) who hired him in the first place but then was agog at his perfectionism and eccentric extravagance-tendencies, and pulling a Magnificent Ambersons ten years before that and hiring another director to shoot a new ending. Thankfully though there was a reconstruction (somewhat like the 1954 A Star is Born where you have some stills and a random shot here or there to fill in some gaps via the script that Stroh...
