The Venice Film Festival has set as its pre-opening event the launch of a freshly restored — and re-imagined — version of Erich von Stroheim’s controversial 1929 silent movie “Queen Kelly.”
The legendary unfinished film, starring Gloria Swanson (“Sunset Boulevard”) as an innocent convent girl who winds up running a brothel in Africa, will world premiere in a 4K reconstruction incorporating newly discovered materials and with a storyline based on Stroheim’s original script.
The new “Queen Kelly” will world premiere at the Lido’s Sala Darsena theatre on Aug. 26 during a gala event featuring a live performance of U.S. composer Eli Denson’s new orchestral score.
As Variety wrote in its original 1928 review, “Queen Kelly, which Erich von Stroheim originally wrote as ‘The Swamp,’ was the director’s eighth silent picture and was undertaken at the behest of Gloria Swanson.” The film “was in production less than three months, from 1 November 1928 to 21 January 1929, when Swanson, finally fed up with her director’s excesses, told financier Joseph Kennedy to shut it down after an expenditure of $800,000,” Variety reported at the time.
The movie — which was shot in sequence — was shut down by Swanson “after several scandalous African sequences were filmed,” as a statement from Venice and Milestone Films put it.
The “Queen Kelly” plot revolves around a young woman named Patricia Kelly (Swanson) who leaves a convent after becoming involved with a dissolute European prince. She then travels with the prince to Africa where several cruel plot twists lead her to becoming the madam of a seedy brothel.
In 1985, Dennis Doros – co-founder with Amy Heller of Milestone Films, the U.S. outfit specialized in discovering and distributing vintage cinema – created what at time was described as a “completed” version of “Queen Kelly” that launched from the 42nd edition of Venice. Forty years later, Doros has returned to “Queen Kelly” and “thanks to new research, access to original nitrate materials, and the tools of digital restoration — he has created a gorgeous new reimagining of this lost masterpiece,” the statement said.
Milestone distributes films globally through Kino Lorber.
The 82nd edition of Venice will run Aug. 27-Sept. 6. The lineup will be announced on July 22.