Restored 1929 Erich von Stroheim film 'Queen Kelly' returns to theaters

The 1929 silent film Queen Kelly, directed by Erich von Stroheim, has returned to theaters in a newly reassembled restoration that Milestone Films calls "an improved reimagining." The shimmering, sensitively scored restoration is said to accentuate both the lurid and the romantic elements of von Stroheim’s story.

The film began as von Stroheim’s fervid tale of a convent orphan who attracts a prince but became a production fiasco when Gloria Swanson left and her producing partner Joseph P. Kennedy halted filming. A truncated, altered version was released abroad, and the film’s incomplete history prompted decades of speculation about what might have been.

The restoration draws on nitrate prints, outtakes, stills and other materials (after a prior reconstruction in 1985) to bring out the production’s opulence. The palace of the film’s "mad queen" (Seena Owen) is lavishly staged; Swanson appears as Patricia Kelly, and Walter Byron plays Prince Wolfram, who meets Kelly during a nun-led procession, sets fire to the convent and kidnaps her.

A notorious sequence has the queen driving Kelly from the palace with lashings from a riding crop. The film’s second half shifts through episodes—Kelly tending a dying aunt in East Africa, a coerced marriage to an older suitor, a sudden montage of intertitles and fragments that show Kelly becoming a bordello madam before she ends up with Wolfram.

Key Topics

Culture, Queen Kelly, Erich Von Stroheim, Gloria Swanson, Milestone Films, Joseph P. Kennedy