About

This ticketed Live Music & Film event screening of silent film Queen Kelly will be accompanied by David Baily on the Gallery's Wurlitzer Organ. The event will be followed by a free screening of Sunset Boulevard.

A notorious Hollywood tale, the story behind the silent feature film Queen Kelly is just as dramatic as the film itself. The film had everything going for it: a megawatt movie star Gloria Swanson marshalled her married lover Joseph R Kennedy to bankroll a sure-fire hit of forbidden love written and directed by acclaimed film director Erich von Stroheim.

It was to be a five-hour ground-breaking epic but instead the shoot was fraught, its leading lady declared “our director is a madman”, and the film was cancelled mid-way through production. Queen Kelly languished for years as an unfinished ‘lost’ film that had reached for great artistic heights yet was tantalisingly out of reach. This newly reimagined film has dedicatedly been pieced together, reconstructed from surviving footage by Milestone Films.

“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. When the Queen discovers the lovers, she horsewhips the girl. Returning to the convent, Kelly receives a telegram, summoning her to German East Africa, where her dying aunt begs the girl to wed the syphilitic owner, Jan (Tully Marshall) of the seedy brothel.” Kino