Starring Gloria Swanson, Walter Byron and Seena Owen
Produced by Gloria Swanson Pictures
Queen Regina V rules her small European kingdom with an iron hand. We are told she is mad, walking through the castle naked with only a lap cat to cover her.
Prince Wolfram is unofficially betrothed to the queen and he'd like to put off the wedding as long as possible. After Wolfram spends a night racing chariots with prostitutes, the queen commands the prince to spend the day in the field under the hot sun performing military maneuvers. She wants him ready for her "surprise" that night.
While traveling along the road with his men, Wolfram comes upon a group of nuns and their students. He is instantly attracted to Patricia Kelly, one of the girls studying at the convent. She is embarrassed when she loses a piece of clothing, but the prince ultimately helps her recover some of her dignity.
The prince arrives back at the castle and is informed of the queen's surprise during a feast. The couple will be married the next day. The frustrated prince decides to find Kelly for one last fling before the wedding.
Meanwhile, the nuns at the convent are punishing Kelly for her outburst with the prince. She forgoes dinner and must remain in the chapel for the evening praying.
The prince and his friend sneak into the convent to find Kelly. This quickly proves fruitless as the building has too many rooms. Instead, Wolfram light a fire and pulls the smoke alarm. The panicked nuns begin evacuating when the prince spies Kelly. She faints and Wolfram abducts her.
Now, back at the prince's suite in the castle, the two begin talking over dinner. What begins as a tryst blossoms into true love.
Unfortunately, the queen discovers them and chases Kelly from the castle, flogging her the entire way. A despairing Kelly throws herself into the river but is rescued by a passerby.
Will the prince go ahead with the wedding? And what will Kelly do when she receives a telegraph from her dying aunt asking her to come to an African brothel to marry a wealthy, but creepy plantation owner?
Huh?
Yeah.
Okay.
Yes, that really happens in this movie. To be fair, the original plan for this film was quite different. Von Stroheim envisioned a four-plus hour epic centered mainly around Kelly's life in Africa. Swanson became increasingly frustrated with the director and the script. And the studio was only too happy to stop production one-third of way through. After all, the producers knew that in a world where audiences were clamoring for sound, a four-hour silent would have trouble generating ticket sales.
So Von Stroheim was fired and production halted, leaving Swanson to try and salvage whatever she could.
And in salvaging what was, on paper, the prologue and drawing it out as a feature length movie, Queen Kelly slows to a molasses-in-winter crawl. Every piece of dialogue is followed by prolonged, meaningless glances. We get lengthy scenes explaining what the characters just did in the previous lengthy scene.
And when we downshift without a clutch into the aunt in Africa storyline, it's so jarring that the airbags deploy. There's never any set up that Kelly has other family, let alone an aunt that she would drop everything and globetrot for. It feels like another movie collided with the one I was watching.
It is right to chalk a lot of this up to the production issues. There are other problems here as well. I love seeing Gloria Swanson on screen. I think she's great. She is just terribly miscast here. She's a lot of things, but an innocent student at the convent is not one of them. She looks too old and there's a flirtatious quality to her acting which seems at odds with the character.
The prince seems like someone I am supposed to root for, but I don't know why. He's chasing around prostitutes and generally shirking his responsibilities instead of focusing on his betrothed and the kingdom he will be ruling.
The most ridiculous moment of the film comes when Wolfram sets a fire inside a convent essentially for a one night stand. On what planet is anything he does justified? If he were a teen, maybe you could forgive his attitude. But he's not. He's an immature man.
The only argument you can make that the prince is good is that he doesn't love the queen. And we are told she is bad. Told, not shown. In fact, before she whips Kelly, she doesn't do anything except expedite the wedding date. The whipping is in response to her future hubby cheating on her. The wedding date comes after she sees her prince carousing with hookers. Remind me again: who is the bad guy here? Other than her unintentionally hilarious habit of throwing her cat when angered, the queen hardly seemed evil.
On the positive side, the production design and camerawork are first rate. The palace is impeccably lavish, the convent sparse and dark. Von Stroheim is constantly framing his characters amongst candles and bed posts in ways that make you marvel at the composition.
I would love to review the film Von Stroheim may have made. Maybe he would have found a tighter story in editing. Then again, maybe 250 minutes of these characters would have killed me. Regardless, I can only review the Queen Kelly I've got. And that movie is sadly mediocre and slow.
*1/2 out of *****
Photo from The Studio Era
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