Jerry Lewis's 'The Day the Clown Cried': Footage From Mysterious Unreleased '70s Holocaust Dramedy Surfaces Online
Jerry Lewis in character as Helmut Doork for ‘The Day the Clown Cried’
In 1972, legendary movie comedian Jerry Lewis began production on The Day the Clown Cried, a melodrama in which he plays a washed-up German circus performer named Helmut Doork who — arrested and held captive by the Nazis during WWII — winds up being assigned to entertain Jewish children on their way to the gas chambers at Auschwitz. Though Lewis himself said the film would premiere at the 1973 Cannes Film Festival (watch the clip below from The Dick Cavett Show), the film never came out, and as the years went by, it became a notorious lost film. After decades of not discussing it, Lewis spoke about the film at some length with Entertainment Weekly’s Chris Nashawaty in 2009, though the transcript was not published until 2013. When asked if the film hadn’t been released because Lewis wasn’t happy with it, he replied, “Yes/No.” He also made the point that “I’m pretty sure that it won’t be seen” and that it was never finished.
Watch Jerry Lewis talk plans to debut ‘The Day the Clown Cried’ at the Cannes Film Festival on ‘The Dick Cavett Show’ (at approximately 2:45):
But after all those years of speculation and given its sensitive and unlikely premise, its reputation as a historic disaster has only grown. Suddenly, some of the curiosity about this “lost” film can be satisfied, as parts of it that have been under lock and key have now surfaced in a 31-minute compilation clip posted on Vimeo by an uploader named Kay Brown. It was still there at the time of this writing, but given that it’s unclear where the footage came from, there’s no telling how long it will stay there. UPDATE: The Vimeo link where the clip originally appeared no longer works, but the clip as of this writing has been posted on YouTube:
The clip is, to be sure, a rough cut, apparently assembled from outtakes, snippets taken from a German TV documentary titled Der Clown, and Lewis-shot footage. Nonetheless, it’s the most comprehensive peek yet provided of the project. When the Library of Congress acquired Jerry Lewis’s personal archive in 2015, it reportedly included The Day the Clown Cried, with the stipulation that the film not be screened for 10 years, tantalizing the curious with the possibility it would be seen sometime next decade.
Hear Jerry Lewis talk about ‘The Day the Clown Cried’ prior to the start of production in Paris in 1972:
On the basis of the Vimeo assemblage, it’s not difficult to understand why Lewis kept it out of view all these years — the film’s self-pitying sentimentality is excessive and grating, and Lewis’s performance appears to be embarrassingly overcooked. While its melding of comedy and tragedy in a Holocaust setting may be no more egregious than Life Is Beautiful, the 1998 Roberto Benigni hit that earned the writer/director/star a Best Actor Academy Award, it does come across as the sort of misguided venture that was better left in Lewis’s vault.
Related: Jerry Lewis’s Legendarily Awful Holocaust Clown Movie Will Finally Get Unveiled…in a Decade
In 1992, comedian Harry Shearer told Spy magazine that he saw an early cut of the film back in 1979, and his description has become the go-to quote for people who want to know about the project:
With most of these kinds of things, you find that the anticipation, or the concept, is better than the thing itself. But seeing this film was really awe-inspiring, in that you are rarely in the presence of a perfect object. This was 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.
Related: Jerry Lewis Turned Down the Lead in ‘Some Like It Hot’
Now, for the first time, we all can see some of the scenes we’ve only read about and imagined for years, and start to draw our own conclusions if The Day the Clown Cried is as cringe-worthy as many have expected it to be.
Watch a vintage preview for Jerry Lewis’ ‘The Bellboy’:
