A Film Canon

Queen Kelly constitutes a very odd collaboration between Gloria Swanson and Erich von Stroheim, in which her vested interest in the film finds expression in an appropriation of his demonstratively masculine sadism, most memorably in a scene in which she whips her romantic rival to the point of suicide. It feels as if von Stroheim's taste for transgression is constantly offset by the need to isolate and glamorise Swanson, or, more accurately, to deflect that taste into a vision of sublime femininity, and narrative of courtly love, both of which dichotomise virgin and whore in a manner diametrically opposed to the radical amorality of his earlier efforts. That said, this dichotomy is undermined through a variety of narrative and stylistic devices, from the virgin's eventual position as the madame of a brothel, to the halo of light that surrounds the whore (Swanson), engendering some of the most spectacular cinematography in von Stroheim's oeuvre. Nevertheless, the film is too incomplete to allow this subtext to come to fruition, explaining the tritely melodramatic conclusion, as well as von Stroheim's inability to identify the aristocracy with perversion to the same extent as Foolish Wives, a gesture that may have clarified his pervasive fetishisation of masculine ceremony as symptomatic of an extraordinary terror of women.