Part of Weekend Classics
With its plot centered around a convent girl who is abducted and seduced by a prince before being sent off to a brothel in East Africa, QUEEN KELLY 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. The movie — which was shot in sequence — was shut down by Swanson after just a few of the scandalous African sequences were filmed. The unfinished QUEEN KELLY — like Erich von Stroheim’s desecrated GREED — became Hollywood legend. Basing his reconstruction on von Stroheim’s original scripts, Milestone Films’ Dennis Doros has employed multiple techniques to recreate the film’s dénouement.
Reconstruction Notes:
Dennis Doros and Amy Heller, Milestone Film & Video, Harrington Park, NJ. Nitrate materials and stills courtesy of The George Eastman Museum, Rochester, New York. 4K digital stabilization, timing, and cleanup by Metropolis Post, NYC. Colorist: Jason Crump. Digital restoration artist: Ian Bostick. Supervised by Milestone Films.
“Erich von Stroheim was both man and myth — a visionary, Vienna-born filmmaker with the self-fashioned persona of a Prussian officer in Hollywood — and so too is “Queen Kelly” part genius, part pipe dream…. The shimmering, sensitively scored restoration brings out the production’s opulence and hence the regal stage von Stroheim sets for his characters’ attractions and abjectNion.” —Nicolas Rapold, New York Times
