My favorite Von Stroheim bio says the thing that killed this film is that it was begun smack in the middle of the industry-wide transition to sound. Swanson hired Von Stroheim for her independent producing company because she thought him the greatest director working at the time. The work continued on the film for a period under this condition: Behind the scenes, and unbeknownst to Von Stroheim, financier Joseph Kennedy and Gloria Swanson, concerned about the state of the market into which this film would be released eventually, started discussing ways to bail out the project vis a vis sound vs. silent film. They discussed adding a sound track, basically a music and effects track, after the fact; one plan was to film and insert some singing sequences to a basically silent film as The Jazz Singer had. In the end, it is supposedly Kennedy who nixed the whole thing saying no use throwing good money after bad.
Von Stroheim was troubled by this turn of events, but he didn't hate Swanson over it. Still, he did not see her or speak to her for another 21 years, and then only during the filming of Sunset Boulevard. (He despised this, probably his most high profile film role: "That damned butler role" he supposedly called it to the end of his days. He saw it as a crude burlesque, for an ignorant new generation, of a great silent director-- who just happened to be none other than Erich Von Stroheim.)
Queen Kelly shows modern viewers just how sophisticated the last silent films were visually. It is astonishing the fluid, second-nature communication that took place entirely without words. Title cards had become largely superfluous, a throwback to an earlier style of storytelling. And sound, rather than, as has so often been declared, selling out the developments in silent films, seems a natural outgrowth of these last silent years.
Von Stroheim was troubled by this turn of events, but he didn't hate Swanson over it. Still, he did not see her or speak to her for another 21 years, and then only during the filming of Sunset Boulevard. (He despised this, probably his most high profile film role: "That damned butler role" he supposedly called it to the end of his days. He saw it as a crude burlesque, for an ignorant new generation, of a great silent director-- who just happened to be none other than Erich Von Stroheim.)
Queen Kelly shows modern viewers just how sophisticated the last silent films were visually. It is astonishing the fluid, second-nature communication that took place entirely without words. Title cards had become largely superfluous, a throwback to an earlier style of storytelling. And sound, rather than, as has so often been declared, selling out the developments in silent films, seems a natural outgrowth of these last silent years.