Queen Kelly

It should have been a dream collaboration: a glamorous, world-famous movie star (Gloria Swanson) and her financier lover (Joseph P. Kennedy) hire a celebrated director (Erich von Stroheim) to make what was to be a groundbreaking masterpiece. Instead, Queen Kelly was canceled mid-production and became the most infamous unfinished silent film in cinema history. Von Stroheim’s and obsessive drama about a mad Queen (Seena Owen) obsessed with her feckless fiancé, “Wild” Prince Wolfram (Walter Byron). But when the Prince falls for innocent convent girl Patricia Kelly (Gloria Swanson), a series of mind-boggling and visually over-the-top complications ensue in the startlingly baroque vision of the legendary filmmaker. Based on von Stroheim’s original script, the restoration uses multiple techniques in recreating Queen Kelly’s lurid narrative. Featuring a new orchestral score by Eli Denson. (105 minutes)

“A spectacular, fanatically ornamental, harrowing masterwork of erotic ecstasies and horrors.” – Richard Brody, The New Yorker