Swanson’s Rarely Seen ‘Queen Kelly’ to Screen

When Erich von Stroheim asked creepy, cadaverous Tully Marshall to drool tobacco juice on the hand of his young bride as he slipped a ring on her finger, Gloria Swanson, as the bride, had all she could take of her director’s penchant for decadence.

She called her lover-producer Joseph Kennedy and thereby called a halt to “Queen Kelly” (1928), a great film fragment in which Swanson played an Irish convent girl who catches the eye of a crown prince (Walter Byron)--and the wrath of his mother, the queen (Seena Owen). Had Stroheim had his way, Swanson’s Kitty would have ended up in a Dar-es-Salaam bordello inherited from an aunt. Mastery of the telling detail, revealing a sophisticated sexual psychology, informs every frame of the visually stunning “Queen Kelly,” which Swanson released in 1931 in Europe and South America with her own rather abrupt ending.

Kino International released a superbly restored “Queen Kelly,” incorporating stills, explanatory titles and two edited reels of the African sequences--deleted by Swanson--to create an impressively satisfying 96-minute version.

The Silent Movie, however, is screening at 8 p.m. Wednesday the now more rarely seen Swanson version. (“Queen Kelly” is today best known for a clip showing a radiant Swanson surrounded by votive candles that Billy Wilder included in “Sunset Boulevard.”) Information: (213) 653-2389.

Oscar Micheaux’s 63-minute “Ten Minutes to Live” (1932) and Spencer Williams’ 50-minute “Blood of Jesus” (1941) launch three Friday 8 p.m. screenings of five rarely seen films by black filmmakers at Pomona’s DA Gallery, 244 1/2 Garey Ave.

A father of the African American cinema, Micheaux was always more passionate and tenacious than talented or skilled, and the advent of sound only showed up the severe limitations of his budgets, technique and actors. Yet Micheaux, who favored well-spoken, light-skinned casts, is always fascinating and important for his fervent expression of black aspirations.

A standard “race” movie formula was to use a nightclub setting and then work in a melodramatic plot in between performers. However, after a prologue in which a seducer of naive young women gets his due in a Harlem nightspot, Micheaux focuses on another of the club’s guests (Willor Lee Guilford), who has just received a note from the villain (William Clayton Jr.), who mistakenly believes she had framed him, that she’ll be dead within 10 minutes. Micheaux switches to a virtually silent flashback--helpfully, the villain is deaf and mute--that plays to his strength as an exciting, suspenseful visual storyteller.

Spencer Williams is best known for the Western “Bronze Buckaroo” (1938) with Herb Jeffries, but “Blood of Jesus” is much better, a film of simple, folkloric power about a recently baptized rural woman (Cathryn Caviness), hovering near death from an accidental rifle shot, who is tempted by the devil to proceed to hell (represented by a nightclub and a roadhouse where people are enjoying themselves harmlessly) or to Zion.

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Williams plays her grief-stricken husband; giving the film its shape and impact is the magnificent Heavenly Choir, whose hymns and spirituals are heard throughout the film.

“Dallas Doll” (Friday, Nuart for one week) affords Sandra Bernhard a tailor-made role as a golf pro/New Age guru who seduces the son, wife and husband of an affluent, sedate Australian family only to try to destroy them and even their community. Writer-director Ann Turner unfortunately has undermined her distinctive star with a predictable, overlong and listless film that combines elements of “Teorema” and “Something for Everyone” with, so help me, “Close Encounters of the Third Kind.” (310) 478-6379.

“The Executioners” (Monica 4-Plex Friday-Saturday at midnight) brings back Anita Mui, Maggie Cheung and Michelle Khan as the Heroic Trio, those glamorous martial-arts wizards, and drops them into a post-nuclear society, in which--thanks to radiation--uncontaminated water is in short supply. Unfortunately, this hard-to-follow sequel is as dreary as “The Heroic Trio” is fun. (310) 394-9741.