One of the greatest films never finished. One of Hollywood’s most dangerous alliances. One enduring legend.

In the late 1920s, at the height of silent cinema’s reckless glamour, three formidable figures set out to make an impossible film. Gloria Swanson, the era’s most dazzling star. Erich von Stroheim, cinema’s most obsessive and uncompromising auteur. And Joseph P. Kennedy, a ruthless financier with ambitions far beyond Hollywood. The result was Queen Kelly — a production so extravagant, scandalous, and volatile that it collapsed before completion, leaving behind fragments, myths, and a curse that would haunt everyone involved.

In The Curse of Queen Kelly, Pamela Hutchinson reconstructs the full, astonishing saga of this infamous film: a tale of artistic obsession, moral panic, sexual politics, power struggles, and personal betrayal. Drawing on archival research and vivid storytelling, she traces how a doomed collaboration became one of cinema history’s most notorious cautionary tales — and how Swanson spent decades fighting to preserve its legacy.

Part film history, part Hollywood tragedy, The Curse of Queen Kelly is a gripping account of creative ambition pushed to the brink, and a meditation on what survives when a film is torn apart but refuses to die.

This Curse is an astonishment of richly lurid film history, maniacally researched and lusciously, propulsively written, the story of three luminous legends tangling and untangling their great mythic lives across the most wondrous half-century of cinematic invention. I drank down this intoxicating account of Swanson, Stroheim and Kennedy in avid gulps, my eyes bulging with revelation at every turn of the page. Long live Queen Kelly!

Guy Maddin

Pamela Hutchinson is an author, critic and film historian. Her books include the BFI Film Classics on The Red Shoes and Pandora's Box. She writes on cinema for newspapers and magazines, taking a special interest in silent and classic cinema. She is a columnist for Sight and Sound and regularly appears on BBC radio and at BFI Southbank.

Command Palette

Historical/critical study

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Adventures in Auteurism

The Curse of Queen Kelly