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 Stroheim must have got with his crew, or from outtakes), and what remains here is one of the most tremendous and sensually and just bizarrely charged melodramas of its or any day.

The majority of the film I would even say is close to the dramatic pull and psychologically and morally/spiritually fraught pull off his film Greed, or to another extent Foolish Wives (certain with as much opulence). Sometimes it is a good sign when a filmmaker supplies a rather twisted character something that announces their insidious and black-hearted ways, and as soon as one sees Seena Owen's Queen Regina V with that live cat dropped over her bosoms not leaving much to the imagination, you know you are in for something that will be unlike most other films period much less from the end of the Silent Era (Stroheim had gone decadent and into debauchery before, but this?  Chefs kiss).

What makes the film so wonderful to me is how much this tense dynamic is between the Prince Wolfram (Walter Byron, with his own kind of cool and true charm but with a glint in his eye when he tells Kelly he wants her that would throw off a lot of women much less in her position) and Orphaned-Convented Kelly, who is reprimanded simply for talking to the Prince while out on a stroll in the countryside, and then the Queen at the periphery as she really wants to lock down the Prince in matrimony asap.  But as soon as the Prince sees Kelly, it is all over for him; how he gets her into his castle is itself quite a set piece since he and his like Squire or what have you, as you do, sets off a small fire in the convent to set off the fire alarm and then absconds with Kelly once he can get her in his arms.

How things develop from here I should let you find out, but it is less about what happens as it is with many of the great films than how originally it is shot and acted, and there is something about what Stroheim had with his cast, as much of a pain in the ass he must have been, to get such emotionally dynamic work.  Every time you think an emotion is settled you can tell the director wants them to go further, and then eventual a little further the better.  Sometimes an artist (Kubrick was like this too) can get as emotional truth by going as big and broad as possible since there are still those subtleties within the lines of like what Swanson does in her agog reactions, at first really impressed (note how she and Byron respond when Kelly admits she had *two* pictures of the Prince under her pillow) and then when the Queen discovers the new lovebirds and what she does to Kelly in that hallway.  

There is some drama that shouldn't work as well once the story takes a rather wild turn two thirds of the way in, once Kelly is told she has a dying Aunt she didn't know about living in Africa who wants her to come asap and only once she gets there is she practically pounced upon by a lecherous family friend in crutches who looks like Mr. Burns from the Simpsons only ten years younger and even more grotesque.  That has been the complaint of some critics that the film sort of veers off from its best storyline and there is some truth to that since Byron being gone means the sexual tension is missing.  But Stroheim brings an equal intense and bewildering sense of being trapped and stuck for Kelly in this new home and with a new marriage on the horizon; there is one part where Stroheim shows Kelly disassociating from the Minister to the Prince and back and forth and how it dissolves from one PoV to the next and Swanson's feverish reactions is one of those moments I won't ever forget.

Maybe that latter part of the story (or what was shot before things apparently in the storyline really get into a whole other feverish gear of Melodramatic turns and events, up to and including killings and uprisings) was going to be too much for Stroheim to handle.  But what remains in Queen Kelly, what the director said he thought was his finest work before he was axed, is made so important and profound because of Swanson's gorgeous work here.  She plays Kelly as so impressionable and just confounded that a Prince has interest in her, and then even more, but she doesn't play her as a fool or an idiot either.  She is a sweet, mostly innocent soul who has faith and doesn't want to be corrupted (note the shot and context later rectified for Sunset Blvd), but when she has to go into grandiose turns it is her whole body language as well as her profile that gets us.  She looks incredible here, but that isn't ever what she rests on. 

I can only imagine how pissed Swanson was to let Stroheim go, and I can only imagine what it was like 20 years later reunited as actors when most of America didn't even get to see their collaboration at the time! (The shortened and butchered Queen Kelly was only released in scattered countries in the early 1930s, and later on TV in the 60s before getting Reconstructed in 1985, now in 4K natche).