THREE WEEKS (GB: The Romance of a Queen) (US 1924)
Directed by Alan Crosland
The Prisoner of Zenda was a literary sensation, but Three Weeks was sensational. The instant notoriety of Elinor Glyn’s novel meant it sold in the millions, and that’s just the English-language editions. Conservative critics labelled it obscene, and yet everyone, especially the middle and upper classes, was reading it, even anarchist Emma Goldman, who championed the novel’s openness about female sexual desire, calling it “magnificent”. (St. Louis Post-Dispatch, 01.11.1908) International success was also swift: the first Italian edition, translated by Adelaide Viarengo, appeared in 1909, while others came out even earlier. Why all the fuss? Because Glyn, in her purple prose, dared to tell a story about an unhappily married woman, the Queen of a Balkan nation known only as “the Lady,” who pursues and consummates a relationship with a younger Englishman. Though Three Weeks wasn’t the first novel to sexualize Ruritania, it most definitely marked a dividing line between those authors using the theme for swashbuckling adventures or geopolitical fantasies, and those milking it for fervid romance.
Glyn traced the novel’s genesis to her own unhappy marriage, as well as the 1903 assassination of King Aleksandar I Obrenović and Queen Draga of Serbia: sexual unfulfillment combined with Balkan brutality. She elaborated further on the Slavic nationality of her Queen: “That race possesses the passion and the intensity and the capacity of psychological deduction more than any other.” (Grand Magazine, 03.1920) Within months of publication, Glyn was thinking of a stage adaptation, in her mind starring Alla Nazimova as the sensual Queen and John Barrymore as the Englishman, Paul Verdayne (New York Times, 15.12.1907; Glyn, however, claimed it was Nazimova’s idea). In February 1908, James K. Hackett of Prisoner of Zenda fame acquired the rights while Glyn was touring the States, and newspapers reported that the play, with Hackett producing and collaborating on the adaptation, would open in St. Louis in September, but he pulled out when she refused to eliminate suggestive scenes (New York Times, 22.08.1908). Shortly before then Glyn herself appeared as the Queen at a single invitation-only performance on 23 July at London’s Adelphi Theatre, attended by a who’s who of fashionable society (The Queen, 01.08.1908).
Parodies were immediate, beginning with Too Weak by Ellova Gryn (pseudonym of Montague Charles Eliot, 8th Earl of St. Germans), 1907, and vaudeville found much to satirize. We get some insight into the novel’s readership from a notice in Variety (22.08.1908) reporting that Tom Miner withdrew his unsuccessful burlesque on Three Weeks to expand it for the slightly more sophisticated vaudeville public: “The travesty was lost upon burlesque audiences, who had no idea what it was about.” That same month, D.W. Griffith filmed the bride-to-be in Balked at the Altar titillated while reading the novel. The London stage saw two versions, a thinly disguised variation by G. Carlton Wallace called The Apple of Eden (opening 17.04.1912) and Roy Horniman’s authorized Three Weeks (première 12.07.1917). There were also two dreadfully written anonymous “sequels”, One Day (1909; filmed by Hal Clarendon in 1916), and High Noon (1910) – the copy at the University of California Berkeley, given by the Hearst Corporation, contains Glyn’s angry inscription, “I did not write this book.”
The film we’re screening is one of the more discussed yet least viewed features of the era (sterling work has been done by Vincent L. Barnett, Alexis Weedon, Annette Kuhn, and Laura Horak). This was the third screen adaptation, following a 1914 U.S. film directed by Perry Vekroff for the Reliable Feature Film Corporation (at the Library of Congress) and a Hungarian version, Három hét, by Márton Garas (screened at the 2005 Giornate). Abraham Lehr, vice-president at Goldwyn, fought hard for the rights, promising Glyn significant creative control including script and casting, causing major tension with director Alan Crosland as well as other members of the cast and crew. Beefed-up scenes in the Queen’s homeland of Sardalia are likely the invention of the man credited with the continuity, Carey Wilson, though they could also have received input from June Mathis, listed as “editorial director”. These sequences, full of peasant mobs surging towards the palace where the debauched King engages in drunken orgies, fix the locale in pseudo-Balkan territory, as do the uniforms of the officers and guards. None of these scenes are in the novel, though the 1914 film also adds a backstory, making Paul the son of the murdered king of Veseria, smuggled to England as a baby (that particular sub-theme runs through many Ruritanian stories, and can also be seen this year in Hans Kungl. Höghet shinglar).
Alan Crosland’s version settles down into Glyn territory shortly after, when Paul goes to Switzerland and is enraptured by the Lady. Critics at the time felt there wasn’t enough spark between leads Aileen Pringle and Conrad Nagel, and, truth be told, Pringle loathed her co-star, but there are many other compensatory factors here, not least of which is the hot-house atmosphere, heavy with all that could not be fully expressed in a Hollywood production of 1924. John J. Mescall’s beautiful camerawork received much praise, and Cedric Gibbons’ stunning sets, designed as minimalist evocations of the couples’ tiger skin and rose-strewn trysting places, were so striking that a Los Angeles gallery exhibited the drawings (Motion Picture News, 09.02.1924). Despite the film not quite living up to the scandalous reputation of its source material, guardians of morality were outraged: the French newspaper Le Radical (28.11.1924) reported that the Ku Klux Klan organized against the screening in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, forcing personnel at the cinema to arm themselves. Elsewhere it was banned, while in Britain the title alone was still considered so problematic that it was renamed The Romance of a Queen. The film was never released in Italy.
Amy Sargeant, Jay Weissberg
The reconstruction The only known print of Three Weeks exists at Gosfilmofond in Moscow, in a largely complete element with English flash titles whose surviving beginning and end-of-reel titles use the British release title The Romance of a Queen. The Cineteca del Friuli began negotiations with the archive in 2020 to reconstruct the film using an original continuity script housed at the M-G-M collection in the Doheny Library, University of Southern California. The Cineteca received a 4K DPX (Digital Picture Exchange) file in the autumn of 2021, several months before the Russian invasion of Ukraine; since the war began, we have not had contact with the archive. The Cineteca has reconstructed the opening title based on Goldwyn productions of the period and has recreated missing intertitles and inserts in a clearly identifiable manner.
THREE WEEKS (GB: The Romance of a Queen) (US 1924)
regia/dir: Alan Crosland.
scen: Elinor Glyn.
cont: Carey Wilson.
mont/ed: June Mathis (“editorial director”).
photog: John J. Mescall.
scg/des: Cedric Gibbons.
cost: Sophie Wachner.
asst dir: Lynn Shores.
cast: Aileen Pringle (la regina/The Queen), Conrad Nagel (Paul Verdayne), John Sainpolis (re/King Constantine II), Stuart Holmes (Petrovich), Mitchell Lewis (Vasilli), Robert Cain (Verchoff), Nigel De Brulier (Dmitry), Dale Fuller (Anna), Claire De Lorez (Mitze), William Haines (curato/Curate), H. Reeves-Smith (Sir Charles Verdayne), Helen Dunbar (Lady Henrietta), Charles Green (Tompson), Joan Standing (Isabella), Alan Crosland, Jr. (the young King of Sardalia), George Tustain (capitano delle guardie/Captain of the Guards), Dane Rudhyar (granduca/Grand Duke Peter).
prod: Abraham Lehr, Goldwyn Pictures Corporation.
dist: Goldwyn-Cosmopolitan.
uscita/rel: 10.02.1924.
copia/copy: DCP, 103′ (da/from DPX, da/from 35mm pos. con/with flash titles ENG; orig. l: 7,468 / 7,540 ft.); did./titles: ENG.
fonte/source: La Cineteca del Friuli, Gemona (da una copia digitale fornita dal Gosfilmofond Made from digital material supplied by Gosfilmofond, 2021).