May has been a chaotic month, so I scaled back my itinerary for the Seattle International Film Festival. But there was no way I was going to miss a storied piece of film history.
Erich von Stroheim was hired by Gloria Swanson and her producer/paramour Joseph P. Kennedy to write and direct Queen Kelly (1929). There’s every chance the venture, a sweeping silent epic at a time when sound was already upending the picture business, was doomed from the outset. Compounding that, Stroheim’s well-known meticulousness led to a ballooning budget and the sexually-charged script became steadily more salacious to Swanson’s dismay. Stroheim was fired, the production shut down. A new ending directed by Richard Boleslawski was grafted onto Stroheim’s footage. This truncated version screened theatrically in a clutch of countries but not the United States. Decades later, Stroheim was cast opposite Swanson in Sunset Boulevard (1950) as the devoted butler to her faded star Norma Desmond. Billy Wilder wanted Desmond to watch one of her own films, captivated. According to legend, it was Stroheim himself who suggested using an excerpt from the failure that torpedoed his directorial career.
For years, that tantalizing glimpse was the only way to see any of Kelly. A 1985 restoration hinted at Stroheim’s original design. The updated “reimagining” using newly-discovered material that debuted at last year’s Venice Film Festival was my one SIFF must-see.
Kelly is set in a fictional Middle European country where the primary export is decadence. “Wild” Prince Wolfram’s (Walter Byron) initial encounter with Swanson’s chaste convent girl Kitty involves her losing her bloomers as if she’s carrying a grocery bag that includes celery in an illustration by Art Frahm. So smitten is Wolfram by this alleged meet-cute that he fakes a fire at the convent and kidnaps Kitty. He commits this ostensibly lighthearted crime the night before his wedding to the country’s batshit crazy queen (Seena Owen, slaying). Wildly jealous and given to padding around barefoot carrying a cat, her majesty flings the feline away to horsewhip Kitty out of her betrothed’s arms. Wolfram is imprisoned for his indiscretion while Kitty voyages to Dar es Salaam in German East Africa to sit at her dying aunt’s bedside, where wealthy reprobate Jan (Tully Marshall in a proto-John Carradine performance) waits to marry her. Jan has bankrolled Kitty’s education and clearly wants some return on investment; given Swanson’s age, he’s been doling out dough for decades. One amazing sequence features women including a tattooed tubercular maiden known as Coughdrops cobbling together Kitty’s trousseau from common items like mosquito netting. In the reconstructed scenes, Kitty spurns Jan and under the title nickname reigns over a “dance hall” that is clearly a brothel. (These are the scenes that raised Swanson’s ire, but c’mon, Gloria: “dance hall” is almost always code for brothel in movies.) Stroheim intended the film to be more than five hours long, and I’d wager much of that running time would have been dedicated to seediness and degradation before the lush happy ending. This latest and likely last iteration of Queen Kelly looks spectacular, but for all the opulence in the “courtship” section Swanson’s virginal character is one-note. What works in the film a century later is the very extravagance and earthiness that cost Stroheim his job. Perversity is evergreen.
Among the well-intentioned, middling thrillers I saw at this year’s fest was one genuine surprise. No coy hinting at decadence for Body Blow. Nope, this Australian neo-noir takes a glorious swan dive into the gutter. It’s maybe the most oversexed movie I’ve ever seen, considering the protagonist spends much of the action wearing a male chastity cage. Also, poorly charged anal beads are a plot point. Visually, it’s a ‘90s erotic thriller, smoldering sax solos included, with a Gregg Araki gloss. The premise is straight out of a vintage Gold Medal paperback: good-looking lunkhead under the thumb of a crime lord falls for the kingpin’s eye candy, who suggests ripping off the big man together. Writer/director Dean Francis gleefully subverts every one of these tropes. Lunkhead Aiden (Tim Pocock) is a cop losing his battle with—and almost his badge to—sex addiction, mainlining NoFap podcasts. Kingpin Fat Frankie (a fantastic Paul Capsis) headlines at his own drag club and has the Sydney PD’s balls in his pocket. Tempting Aiden is Cody (Tom Rodgers), Twink on his vanity plate, larceny and possibly nothing else in his heart. Featuring Sacha Horler, hilarious as Aiden’s no-bullshit new boss; a memorable murder that Brian De Palma would be proud of; and gun and cock metaphors galore. Ludicrous and overheated, with Francis and his game cast absolutely committed to all of it.
On the documentary front, I’ll have more to say about Boorman and the Devil, David Kittridge’s deep dive into the making of Exorcist II: The Heretic (1977); this and Queen Kelly provided a Hollywood catastrophes fest within the fest. Boorman was picked up for theatrical release soon after SIFF ended. So was The Big Cheese, Sara Joe Wolansky’s film about the underdog effort to field an American squad of cheesemongers at the Mondial du Fromage in France, where the feats of strength include a blind tasting and a cut-to-weight challenge where you have to eyeball a quarter-pound of some unfamiliar variety. I enjoyed it, but I’m a sucker for movies about competitions between practitioners of arcane disciplines; see last year’s SIFF entry BAR, about craft bartenders. Maybe that’s because of the deep sense of community that grows up around such contests.
What I’m Reading
You never know how you’ll discover a book, or when. For A Hell of a Drink research, I recently read Partially Devoured: How Night of the Living Dead Saved My Life and Changed the World by Daniel Kraus. It was my introduction to Kraus, even though his acclaimed novel Whalefall (2023) is coming to the big screen later this year and his latest, Angel Down, was named one of the New York Times 10 Best Books of 2025. I liked Partially Devoured so much I picked up Angel Down. I consumed the first few chapters in a single gulp and, still marveling at what I’d read, looked at my phone to discover that the damn thing had just won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction.
An impromptu platoon of misfits is assembled during the Great War and dispatched into No Man’s Land to silence the shrieks of a wounded man. Only what they find isn’t a fellow soldier but a celestial being, who comes to represent something different to each of them. Their nominal leader is Cyril Bagger, a conniver who has conspired to stay as far from battle as he can, even if it means planting so many fallen comrades in the ground that he’s earned the moniker Private Gravedigger. He narrates the tale in a single sentence spanning the length of the book, a gambit that beautifully captures the immediacy, chaos, and sheer destructive wastefulness of war.
and then, so then, but then, it happens, a thing happens, a thing, it happens, how else to put it, Bagger knows he’ll never grasp it, the thing, which happens,
I occasionally wished a paragraph would begin with but or yet just for degree of difficulty points. Still, Kraus pulls off a staggering achievement full of moments that burn into the memory.
and while there’s no telling which boy bled this blood, what kind of blood is a different matter, fourteen days into this cyclone of cartilage and lead, Bagger has developed a sommelier palate for the tart fizz of brachial blood, the fudgy sorghum of femoral, the meaty sludge of heart wounds, the rancid reek of any gut juice at all, and the warm salt of arterial blood he now licks from his lips,
I didn’t think a book about Night of the Living Dead would bring me to the latest Pulitzer Prize winner. But you get there how you get there.
We saw Queen Kelly at the Film Forum and I loved it for the very reasons you mentioned here.
Swanson’s performance reminded me of Doris Day in Lucky Me—panicky and disconnected, though she had her moments.
I am so in the mood for “ludicrous and overheated.”