MMoCA Cinema • Queen Kelly

Overview

MMoCA Cinema • Queen Kelly
Friday, December 4 • 7 PM • Lecture Hall
Queen Kelly | Erich von Stroheim | USA | 1929 | 105 minutes

In 1929, Erich von Strohiem’s scandalous collaboration with Gloria Swanson, Queen Kelly, was canceled mid-production and became the most infamous unfinished film in cinema history. 

Von Stroheim’s baroque and obsessive drama opens in a European country ruled by a mad Queen (Seena Owen) obsessed with her feckless fiancé, “Wild” Prince Wolfram (Walter Byron). The dissolute prince falls for an innocent but flirtatious convent girl, Patricia Kelly (Swanson), kidnaps her, and brings her to his rooms. Basing this 2026 reconstruction on von Stroheim’s original scripts, Dennis Doros and Amy Heller from Milestone Film have employed multiple techniques to reimagine and recreate the film’s lurid dénouement. (Kino Lorber)

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

“An outlandish saga of illicit love in sordid surroundings…This new restoration may just be everything that [Gloria] Swanson dreamed of for her lovechild Queen Kelly.”  Pamela Hutchinson, The Guardian

About MMoCA Cinema

MMoCA Cinema is curated by James Kreul, Assistant Curator, Film and Art Video and supported by MMoCA members.