Erich von Stroheim’s epic unfinished swan song QUEEN KELLY, now has a new digital reconstruction and 4K restoration starring Gloria Swanson is the perfect New Year Gift for passionate vintage cinema enthusiasts. Recognised as von Stroheim’s decadent late-silent masterpiece and epic unfinished swan song, it pulls no punches.

Filmed in 1929, the story opens in the imaginary European country of Cobourg-Nassau, sometime before the first World War, where the vain and cruel Queen Regina V (Seena Owen) obsesses over her feckless fiancé (Walter Byron), Prince “Wild” Wolfram. When the dissolute prince encounters an innocent but flirtatious convent girl, Patricia Kelly (Gloria Swanson), he falls in love. Desperate to see her before his upcoming wedding to the Queen, he kidnaps Kelly and brings her to his rooms in the palace. When the Queen discovers the lovers, she whips the nightgowned girl and throws her out into the night. After an unsuccessful suicide attempt, Kelly returns to the convent, where she receives a telegram, summoning her to the bedside of her dying aunt (Florence Gibson) in Dar-es-Salaam, German East Africa. There, the innocent young girl is shocked to find herself in a seedy bordello. On her deathbed, Kelly’s aunt begs her niece to wed the syphilitic brothel owner, Jan (Tully Marshall).

However there was much  more drama off -screen as on it. Von Stroheim had shot just one third of the story in over 4 hours, so Swanson (also his lover) fired him, recut the film and added music with a score by Adolph Tandler and a newly shot arbitrary ending

It received real bad reviews and was a box office disaster , and had the effect of killing off the behind-the-camera career of  Von Stroheim, and Swanson never made another film until her 1950 comeback movie triumph Sunset Blvd.

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NEW RESTORATION OPENS JANUARY 16 AT FILM FORUM NY then available on Kino Lorber VOD