Safeguarded by Langlois in the 1950s and restored in 1983, Queen Kelly is one of the most infamous unfinished film maudits in history. Erich von Stroheim’s masterpiece was originally funded by Gloria Swanson’s production company until shooting shut down for good in 1929. In a debauched Central European kingdom, a mad queen must wed a notorious libertine, who instead falls for a young nun (Swanson). “Queen Kelly takes us into a world that would have definitely disappeared without Stroheim . . . a perverse world, crueller than Sade’s, a vanished world of which Stroheim brought out the phantoms,” wrote Langlois. “Queen Kelly takes us into a universe of incest and solemn boredom, degeneracy and absolute power, complacency and complicities left unpunished, a universe made for creating monsters, semi-madmen, victims, slaves, valets.”