The Legend Behind the Jerry Lewis Holocaust Clown Movie You’ll Never See – Armessa Movie News

Somewhere in the universe exists perhaps the boldest and most challenging film ever printed. It centers around one of the worst human atrocities in world history, the Holocaust, and it is told by one of the great artistic minds, but one who specialized in screwball comedy. The Day the Clown Cried was completed among all facets of production in 1972 but was ultimately shelved. Now deceased, Jerry Lewis vowed that his maverick film that dealt with the horrors of Jewish people imprisoned in a Nazi concentration camp never see the light of day. By various accounts, the original film may never be seen by a mass audience. The longer Lewis’ film remains a piece of lost media, the further the legend will grow surrounding it.

Before any mythic folklore was attached to The Day the Clown Cried, controversy followed the film into pre-production. Many were skeptical of Lewis’ aptitude to handle a subject of such seriousness and notoriety. Unlike in the States, Lewis’ previous films were critically acclaimed overseas. In France, with the rise of the French New Wave and emphasis on the film director’s importance, he was accepted as a genuine cinematic auteur by the country’s film scholarship and gradually formed as a pop culture icon. After his creative partnership with Dean Martin ceased, Lewis began starring in comedies as a solo act, but in addition, he evolved into a director, controlling all aspects of creative storytelling in the 1960s.

American audiences see Jerry Lewis’ filmography of wacky slapstick comedies like The Bellboy, The Ladies Man, and The Nutty Professor and dismiss his ability to direct a comedy-drama in the backdrop of Nazi-controlled Germany, French audiences already recognized Lewis as a filmmaking genius. This was before Lewis unveiled his surprising dramatic chops to audiences in Martin Scorsese‘s The King of Comedy. To this day, the Holocaust remains a challenging subject to tell fictitious stories about, especially when it is being told by a comedic artist. Not even 30 years after the conclusion of the real-life events, Lewis was able to have this film greenlit in France, which is a testament to the respect he garnered.

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‘The Day the Clown Cried’s Troubled Production & Critical Backlash

Based on a script from Joan O’Brien and Charles Denton, which is accessible to the public today, The Day the Clown Cried is about a washed-up German circus clown, Helmut Doork (Lewis) who is sent to a Nazi concentration camp after mocking the regime and Adolf Hitler in a drunken rant. While imprisoned, he seeks the burden to entertain the Jewish prisoners, notably the children, before they are sent off to die in a gas chamber. Before its eventual state of distribution purgatory, the film’s production was met with various setbacks, including financial shortages that cost Lewis to spend his own money to finish the film after producer Nat Wachsberger failed to meet his end of the bargain. According to O’Brien, Lewis reconfigured the character of Helmut into a more redeemable figure and less reprehensible. In some ways, this film was Lewis’ shot to match the feats that Charlie Chaplin reached with The Great Dictator — a film that is one part socio-political satire and another part faithful text to the star’s on-screen persona.

For the limited amount of people who have watched the film, The Day the Clown Cried undoubtedly left a substantial impact on said viewers, but not necessarily a positive one. In 1992, Spy magazine published an oral history surrounding the production and following legend of the film. O’Brien designated the rough cut that she watched as a “disaster,” partially in frustration due to Lewis’ softened treatment of the clown character. In the same article, longtime Simpsons voice actor Harry Shearer offered a review of mockery for the film. Shearer described his viewing experience as “awe-inspiring.” Speaking to the satirical magazine, he sarcastically referred to the film as a “perfect object. This movie is so drastically wrong, its pathos and its comedy are so wildly misplaced, that you could not, in your fantasy of what it might be like, improve on what it really is. ‘Oh, My God!’—that’s all you can say,” he continued, claiming that Lewis’ film, whom Shearer was not closely connected with, was “not funny…and somebody’s trying too hard in the wrong direction to convey this strongly-held feeling.”

As the legend of the film’s secrecy grow, the ridicule it received heightened as a result. Safe to say, The Day the Clown Cried has not received the same respectability as a piece of sought-after lost high-art to the likes of Orson Welles’ The Other Side of the Wind (which was finally released by Netflix in 2018). In certain cases, channeling the reaction of Shearer, Lewis’ unreleased film desires to be seen to confirm the baffling nature of its folklore existence, as if a Holocaust drama from Jerry Lewis is only feasible as an elaborate prank.

Jerry Lewis’ Complicated Feelings About His Unreleased Film

Ultimately, The Day the Clown Cried has yet to be released for multiple reported reasons. A long-running distribution battle involving Jerry Lewis and producer Nat Wachsberger is a likely cause for the film being shelved. More intriguingly, Lewis has since expressed dissatisfaction with the current final product, stating in 2013, “You will never see it. No one will ever see it, because I am embarrassed at the poor work.” When asked about the status of the film in the years up to his death in 2017, Lewis was adamant that the public will never see it and constantly reinforced the deemed poor quality of the picture. However, in a sudden turn in 2015, Jerry Lewis donated an incomplete copy of The Day the Clown Cried to the Library of Congress. The donation came with one provision: the film was not to be screened on any date earlier than June 2024. The only leaked material of the film that audiences may be properly granted to see in just over a year was provided by a German documentary, Der Clown, that showed behind-the-scenes access to the creation of the film and a condensed 31-minute cut with the raw footage.

To the dismay of cinephiles and any curious follower of lost media, the certainty that The Day the Clown Cried ever sees a public screening is compromised, as The New York Times reported that there are no complete negatives of the film are in immediate access of the Lewis estate. Since his death and dedication to philanthropy in the back half of his life, Lewis’ legacy and reverence in the public eye have only grown. Obtaining a film reel of his unfinished film may have been coveted to satisfy an endless source of ironic amusement in the past, but today, audiences are more prepared to be open-minded to what Lewis had to say about the Holocaust and how it affected his Jewish faith. Between Schindler’s List, The Pianist, and Life is Beautiful, a film about clouding the horrors of life inside a concentration camp, audiences have demonstrated an ability to handle arresting dramas and bittersweet fables set during this time of genocide. Having said that, there is something valuable about the continued state of purgatory that The Day the Clown Cried is stuck in. At the end of the day, the legend is always more powerful than reality itself.