SOURCE: "Sparing No Hint of Verismo," in Sight & Sound, Vol. 54, No. 4, 1985, pp. 301-2.

In the following essay, Milne examines a restored version of Stroheim's Queen Kelly.

Hitherto, prints of Queen Kelly have ended, satisfactorily if unsatisfyingly, with Gloria Swanson's despairing leap from the bridge (followed, in the version issued by Swanson in 1931, by a coda not directed by Stroheim in which Prince Wolfram made it a double suicide). Although the watchman is seen jumping to the rescue, making it obvious that the convent-bred innocent deflowered by her princely admirer would in fact be saved and go on to justify the title through her subsequent metamorphosis into Queen Kelly, it worked well enough as a typical Hollywood tale of the bitter-sweet wages of sin, rendered untypical by the magnificence, the daring and the detail of Stroheim's imagery. The sense of dissatisfaction lay in the lack of any clue, even...