Queen Kelly (Von Stroheim, 1929): BFI Southbank, NFT1, 2.30pm
This special screening will be introduced by film critic and historian Pamela Hutchinson who will be signing copies of her book The Curse of Queen Kelly in the BFI Southbank Foyer following the film. There will be a live piano accompaniment by Neil Brand. The long-awaited restoration and reconstruction of the surviving nitrate reels of Queen Kelly, based on Von Stroheim’s original scripts, with added stills and titles, was undertaken by longtime friends of the BFI, Dennis Doros and Amy Heller of Milestone Films.
Chicago Reader review:
Erich von Stroheim’s 1928 film was the last that he would be allowed to
sign, yet it, too, survives only in a fragmentary version. The story of a
convent girl who is romanced by a prince but ends up as the mistress of
an African bordello, it was intended to run for five hours, but
producer Joseph P. Kennedy (who financed the film as a showcase for his
close friend Gloria Swanson) turned off the money at the midway point,
and the film was released in a truncated 70-minute version. (Two reels
of the African footage, shot but never incorporated into the original
prints, were discovered some years ago and spliced into the present
101-minute version.) Though it’s far from coherent, Queen Kelly is one of Stroheim’s most provocative works, not just in terms of its
extravagant subject matter but in the aesthetic shift it suggests
between the fierce realism of Stroheim’s earlier work and a distant,
abstract perspective that points to the cinema of Josef von Sternberg.
Dave Kehr
Here (and above) is the trailer.
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