RETROSPECTIVE OF QUEEN KELLY (1929)
I am a fan of silent film director Eric von Stroheim and yet I had never seen his incomplete work, Queen Kelly. Intented to be five hours long, it was only half finished, and released in the 1980s with titles and stills to fill in the story. Regarless of the uncompleted film, what remains is stunning, haunting, and compelling. I literally could not be moved from my seat from the time Wolfram enters the convent to the time Kelly leaves the palace.
The storyline is fairly simple. A prince of Coburg-Nassau, "Wild" Wolfram, meets schoolgirl Patricia Kelly (Gloria Swanson) one day while leading his cavalry on horseback. A free-spirited baudy exchange ensues (baudy by 1928 standards). The reverend mother sends her to bed without any supper. Meanwhile, Wolfram is betrothed to marry the mad Queen, Regina V. They clearly don't like one another, but they are getting married. The best line in this silent film: "I have a surprise for you," says Regina. Wolfram replies, "It must be very unpleasant, otherwise you wouldn't be so cheerful."
But Wolfram falls madly in love with Kelly, at first sight, and must see her, even though it's the night before his wedding. What ensues from her through the end of the movie is some of the best filmwork of the silent era. The pantomime acting was by then an artform, and von Stroheim's penchant for extravagance is not abated here. Considering it was 1928, some of the visual effects are quite dazzling.
Kelly is chased from the palace by the mad queen (Seena Owen) in a true fetishistic von Stroheim fashion, and later winds up being summoned to German East Afrika to the bedside of her dying aunt. It turns out the aunt ran a brothel.
In the only extant sequence in the African portion of the film, the reptilian Jan, an old degenerate on crutches, schemes to take over the brothel and winds up marrying Kelly, quite literally, over the dying aunt. The scene is fantastic: Kelly and Jan on one side and a black Roman Catholic priest with black alterboys on the other. I can only imagine the implication to a white audience of a black priest ordaining an unholy alliance between a convent girl and a despicable, criminal schemer who wants to get control of the brothel. As in Greed, von Stroheim's other altered masterpiece, the simultaneity of a wedding and a funeral is both funny and horrifying (in Greed, a funeral procession is shown behind a pries marrying McTeague and Trina; here, the priest has just performed ultimate unction (last rites) on the aunt, and then marries then with the dying woman between them).
Incomplete thought it might be, what is available is a testament to what some call the inescapable wordless wonderment that was the silent movie, the beautiful black and white lost world of the cinema.
NB: The European and American versions have differing storylines and endings.
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