Name: Queen Kelly
Start: 2026-06-14T19:00:00-05:00
End: 2026-06-14T21:00:00-05:00
Location: Heights Theater

Queen Kelly
1929 | D: Erich von Stroheim
Gloria Swanson, Walter Byron, Seena Owen
Presented by Archives on Screen, Twin Cities with an introduction by Maggie Hennefeld (UMN).
A wayward convent girl (Gloria Swanson) is abducted by a flirtatious prince (Walter Byron) who is incidentally betrothed to a mad queen (Seena Owen) in the fictive European country of Cobourg-Nassau. Queen Regina imprisons her faithless fiancé while Patricia Kelly is summoned by her dying aunt to a brothel in Dar-es-Salaam.
Queen Kelly is a masterpiece that was never completed. Directed by Erich von Stroheim and financed by Joseph P. Kennedy (with whom Swanson was having an affair), Queen Kelly had been unseen for too long--except by Norma Desmond (Swanson) in a memorable scene of Sunset Boulevard (1950). That is, until Dennis Doros first restored the film in 1985. Milestone's new reconstruction of this sizzling melodrama attempts to imagine what von Stroheim's film could have looked like in 1929. **Do not** miss your chance to experience it on the big screen with a new score by Eli Denson.