Swanson, Kennedy, Stroheim and the Doomed “Queen Kelly”

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Queen Kelly is one of early Hollywood’s most controversial movies...burdened with misfortune, its story is that of an excruciatingly long drawn-out saga. The 1928 feature was intended as a star vehicle for top silent screen actress Gloria Swanson who had defected from Paramount to go independent. Joe Kennedy Sr, patriarch of the tragedy-soaked Kennedy family of jinked politicians, comes into the film’s story at this juncture. In the late 1920s Kennedy shrewdly acquired a string of small movie studios which he consolidated into RKO (Radio-Keith-Orpheum) in 1928. 

Kennedy’s foray into the movie biz led to a meeting with Swanson and a three-year affair between the two. Joe was hoping to launch a successful career as a Hollywood film tycoon and agreed to finance Swanson’s Queen Kelly. Controversial auteur director Erich von Stroheim was brought in to direct, this was the start of everything going pear-shaped. Let loose with a big budget, Stroheim, an autocratic perfectionist by nature, dragged out the filming of what was intended to his personal masterpiece with constant reshoots and delays – amassing enough footage for a five-and-a-half hour epic.

With the movie still not finished and the Austrian-American director having drained more than $800,000 from the budget, Stroheim was sacked. Filming done, this is where the machinations started getting really interesting. Swanson discovered that Kennedy has deceived her, instead of being an investor in the project Joe had loaned Gloria the capital, Swanson therefore was wholly responsible for the loss! To try to recoup her money, Swanson tried to finish the disaster of a movie❦...after savage editing a sound version was released in Europe in 1932 (Stroheim, holding US rights to the production, vetoed an American release) (‘Erich von Stroheim’s Damned Queen: Queen Kelly’, Michael Koller, Senses of Cinema, August 2007, www.sensesofcinema.com).

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Sunset Boulevard 

American audiences finally got their first glimpse of Queen Kelly in a curious manner some 20 years later. Sunset Boulevard (1950) reunited two of the original forces behind Queen Kelly, Swanson and Stroheim (as actor). The latter talked director Billy Wilder into using an excerpt from Queen Kelly in Sunset Boulevard – in a delicious irony the footage of Swanson, as Norma Desmond a forgotten silent film star, is presented as one her great silent films. The ensuing interest generated led eventually to a belated second release of the 1928 movie in 1957.

In 1985 Kino International brought to the screen a third release of the much maligned and butchered Queen Kelly. This restored version was based on Stroheim’s original script (www.tvguide.com) but of course still incomplete as intended. 

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❦ timing also contributed to Queen Kelly’s failure, specifically the increasing popularity of ‘’talkie” movies and the recent introduction of the Hays Code which insisted Stroheim make cuts to the raunchy content in the film, which Stroheim characteristically refused