Queen Kelly

[strandinthewind]

Swanson and Stroheim's unfinished but epic opus is on right now. I know EVS was a maniac, but this is still one helluva movie. Finished, though, it would have run over five hours - thus EVS' madness.

I must also say, his Greed is one of the best movies I have ever seen.

[amber]

Greed is good. Difficult to watch, though, IMO. I've never watched Queen Kelly. Are you going to watch the whole thing? Do you recommend?
EVH madness indeed.

On another note -

There is a movement to get some fab gay men up to the Berkeley TP show. We've all been talking about how you must come. It's on a Fri and Sat. The buzz is, Paula may come and bring Curtie, and I'm wooing Tow and Spark. Ragandbone will be there, as will Anita and goldenbraid. Perhaps Tiffles.
You should really try and clear your schedule. It's not a party without Strand, is it????

[strandinthewind]

I would love to go to the show - but work is a bear right now

Queen Kelly is brilliant - but it is umcomplete and they use stills to show the scenes not shot. It is methodical in its production and what would normally be a two minute scene is 20 minutes but those 20 minutes are stuningly portrayed - thus the brilliance and mania of EVS. Swanson was fab in this as well, though as she said she was a little long in the tooth to pay a convent girl Joe Kennedy produced this.

Also - did you see this?

July 11, 2006
Critic’s Choice
New DVD's: 'Beyond the Rocks'
By DAVE KEHR
BEYOND THE ROCKS

Rudolph Valentino has the bad luck to be remembered for his worst performance. Clips from “The Sheik,” directed by George Melford in 1921, seem to turn up in every documentary on silent filmmaking. When Valentino, playing an Arab chieftain, approaches the helpless British socialite (Agnes Ayres) he has stolen away to his desert caravan, his eyeballs-bulging, nostrils-flaring pantomime confirms what most people have come to think of silent cinema: that it was crude, wildly melodramatic and hopelessly naïve.

But the excesses of “The Sheik” were hardly typical of Valentino or of silent film at the height of its sophistication in the 1920’s. In “Beyond the Rocks,” a 1922 feature long thought lost, his work seems almost shyly understated, as it does in most of his other extant films. In “Beyond the Rocks,” discovered in 2002 by the Netherlands Film Museum, he plays opposite Gloria Swanson, one of the top female draws of the silent era and a diva who could give lessons to today’s pop stars. Valentino’s reserved British aristocrat is bedeviled by his love for Swanson’s character, the daughter of a ruined army officer who has married an American millionaire to oblige her calculating father and her two sisters.

Now available on DVD from Milestone Films (milestonefilms.com), “Beyond the Rocks” looks very beautiful in the tinted restoration from the Dutch museum and is backed by an inventive blend of 20’s themes and modern jazz by the composer Henny Vrienten. It is no rediscovered masterpiece; the dull, frontal framing by the director Sam Wood strips it of most visual interest. But it is a fascinating chance to compare and contrast the playing styles of two of the silent era’s most representative stars. Swanson seems to be using every external tool at her disposal — the stylized makeup, with bee-stung lips and spidery false eyelashes; the extravagant costuming that swaddles her in velvet and pearls — but Valentino seems direct and unadorned (except for his artfully extended eyebrows).

Which is most likely the reason Valentino still seems accessible to modern audiences, while Swanson can be difficult to identify as a human being. With his boy-man good looks and the slim body of a dancer, he could fit right in with the current generation of “kidult” stars, like Matt Damon, Johnny Depp and Leonardo DiCaprio. It is Valentino — born Rodolfo Alfonzo Raffaelo Pierre Filibert Guglielmi di Valentina d’Antonguolla, in Castellaneta, Italy — who seems the cheerful, all-American type, while the former Gloria May Josephine Svensson, born in Chicago, seems to be striving for a European sophistication and aristocratic distance.

The United States in the 1920’s was a young, largely rural nation that emerged from World War I with money, power and an inferiority complex. Like many of the society dramas that were so popular during the period, “Beyond the Rocks” addresses that anxiety in many different ways, instructing its viewers on the proper upper-crust way to wear a dinner jacket or sip a glass of Champagne, while coming down in favor of the traditional democratic American values of honesty and simplicity in the end.

The Milestone disc includes a 60-minute feature from Valentino’s pre-stardom days, Robert Z. Leonard’s “Delicious Little Devil” (1919); an introduction by Martin Scorsese; and several documentaries on the film’s rediscovery and preservation. $29.95, not rated.

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/11/mo...gewanted=print
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Needdless to say, I am swooning. AND - this is the much better European version as the US version limited the amount of time for each kiss - Swanson wrote in her autobiography that "Poor Rudy could barely get his nostrils flaring before they would yell cut for the American version"