The Dryden will screen Queen Kelly (Erich von Stroheim, U.S. 1929, 75 min., 35mm) as part of the Senior Matinee series.

In a career laden with personality and business clashes, Erich von Stroheim never faced any like those surrounding Queen Kelly, his final silent film, starring Gloria Swanson and financed—with an ever-ballooning budget—by Swanson's then-lover Joseph P. Kennedy. The entire production was turbulent, to say the least, and von Stroheim was furiously dismissed by Swanson before the project's completion. But, von Stroheim had already created most of the psychologically penetrating film that ranks among the great late silents. Set in one of von Stroheim's Ruritanian European kingdoms (originally intended to shift from there to the brutality of a degraded settlement in East Africa), the film is filled with von Stroheim's obsessions with sexuality, mental and emotional instability, and intolerance of hypocrisy. Queen Kelly remains a tribute to the kaleidoscopic vision of a filmmaker who never quite knew when to stop—which in retrospect is a privilege for us to experience.

[source: George Eastman Museum, 2018-Feb-26]