The ambition behind this film was enormous. One of the biggest movie stars in the world, Gloria Swanson, persuaded her inamorata, the financier Joseph P. Kennedy, to fund a massive, sacrilegious epic about a convent girl’s moral dissipation, to be produced by Swanson and directed by the genius filmmaker Erich von Stroheim. Naturally, the personalities involved were too volatile to finish the film and it has always been frustratingly incomplete, until now.

This new preservation is made by Milestone Films, who are indebted to the George Eastman Museum, the Library of Congress National Audio-Visual Conservation Center, the Harry Ransom Center, the Margaret Herrick Library, Paramount Pictures, and the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum for providing the original nitrate 35mm materials, photographs, and papers used to create this new version.