'QUEEN KELLY' OPENS - MORE THAN 50 YEARS LATE (Published 1985)

One of the most indelible moments from Billy Wilder's classic film ''Sunset Boulevard'' finds the eclipsed silent star Norma Desmond (played, of course, by Gloria Swanson) indulging in her favorite pastime - watching her own old movies. Norma gazes enchanted as her younger self mimes piety and longing for an audience of two in the diva's Beverly Hills palazzo. ''Still wonderful, isn't it?'' she croons to her glazed-eyed gigolo, for whom those flickering images are snapshots from the Stone Age. ''We didn't need dialogue! We had faces!'' Norma exclaims, and then proves it by tilting her matchless profile into the beam of light cast by the movie projector.

Ironically the clip we see representing La Desmond at her apex - an incandescent creature lit by a forest of votive candles - is an excerpt culled from ''Queen Kelly,'' in its time considered Gloria Swanson's most ignominious failure. Produced at the end of the silent era by Miss Swanson and her then business partner Joseph P. Kennedy and directed by Erich von Stroheim (her ''Sunset Boulevard'' co-star two decades later), ''Queen Kelly'' was halted less than halfway through shooting at a dead loss of a then-astronomical $800,000. Its collapse marked the beginning of the end of its star's reign as Queen of the Box Office, and effectively finished von Stroheim's always turbulent career as one of the screen's most eccentric and gifted directors. Briefly released in Europe with a hastily concocted conclusion of Swanson's devising, ''Queen Kelly'' was never commercially exhibited in the United States. Those brief snippets incorporated into ''Sunset Boulevard'' were, in fact, the first glimpse American audiences had ever had of this ill-starred project.

Few lost movies have elicited such avid curiosity from film aficionados everywhere. Last Friday, opening a run at the New York Shakespeare Festival's Film at the Public program, ''Queen Kelly'' at last achieved its New York theatrical premiere, in a version approximating von Stroheim's intentions as closely as possible. To the hour-long narrative which already existed - a mismatched love triangle in a decadent Middle-European backwater - Dennis Doros, a film historian and executive of Kino International Films, distributors of ''Queen Kelly,'' has combined production stills, outtakes, annotations from the von Stroheim scenario, plus two reels of freshly unearthed footage to reconstruct the heroine's descent into the squalor of an East African bordello - ''Queen Kelly's'' uncompleted Act Two. The result is a fascinating artifact, vindicating both its director's audacious vision, and the reluctance of its producer-star to be further lured into von Stroheim's particular brand of nostalgie de la boue.

As recounted by the von Stroheim biographer Richard Koszarski and by Gloria Swanson in her own memoirs, the genesis of ''Queen Kelly'' was the product of vaulting ambition, overweening egos and, in retrospect, most unfortunate timing. In 1928, Swanson was at the pinnacle of her screen popularity. Having recently turned down a million-dollar-a-year renewal of her contract at Paramount, where she had felt exploited in a series of routine pictures, Miss Swanson joined the august company of Chaplin, Fairbanks and Pickford at United Artists as an independent performer empowered to initiate her own projects and reap the profits. Meanwhile, von Stroheim had been soured for good on the studio system after a series of uneven skirmishes with the moguls. In the previous five years, he'd been dismissed as director of one film (''The Merry-Go-Round'') and threatened with same on a second (''The Merry Widow''), while both ''Greed'' and ''The Wedding March'' were hacked to a fraction of their intended length before reaching the screen. The catalyst for the alliance between these two outsized personalities was Joseph Kennedy. At that time a banker with an interest in one of Hollywood's lesser film companies, Mr. Kennedy sought to establish himself in the film industry as a creative and financial power to be reckoned with. Newly in charge of Swanson's business matters, he felt that a von Stroheim production would be just the prestige item to guarantee the clout he was after.

At Mr. Kennedy's behest, the director concocted a vehicle which seemed admirably suited to showcase Swanson's gifts and her backers' ambitions. Originally titled ''The Swamp,'' it focused on innocent, convent-bred Patricia (Kitty) Kelly, who encounters a high living prince (dubbed Wild Wolfram by his cronies) on the eve of his wedding to the demented Queen of feudal Cobourg-Nassau. Infatuation quickly deepens into love, and the incensed ruler banishes Kitty and locks her betrothed in solitary confinement. The girl tries suicide but is rescued, only to be dispatched to the deathbed of her aunt, a proprietor of a house of ill fame in Africa. On her arrival, Kitty is engaged against her will to a repulsive associate of the aunt. Now the reluctant ruler of her own depraved domain, the heroine is at last retrieved by Wolfram, who installs her on his throne after the well-deserved demise of the Queen. The sweep and audacity of this scenario intrigued its intended star, and in November of 1928 ''Queen Kelly'' started production at Mr. Kennedy's F.B.O. (subsequently R.K.O.) Studios.