In 1972, legendary US comedian Jerry Lewis began filming a movie that would never make it to theaters. “The Day The Clown Cried” tells the story of a German circus clown who insults Hitler and ends up in a concentration camp, where he later “cheers up” children who are being sent to the gas chamber. This plot alone is hard to digest – but it is the complicated production history and subsequent disappearance that have made the film a myth among film buffs.
“When you tell people, ‘Jerry Lewis wrote, directed and starred in a drama about a concentration camp clown who leads children to the gas chambers,’ they say, ‘What? Why have I never heard of this film, why have I never seen it?'” journalist and film critic Shawn Levy, author of “King of Comedy: The Life and Art of Jerry Lewis,” told DW.
Venice shows documentation
Material from “The Day The Clown Cried” will be shown for the first time at this year’s Venice Film Festival.
Lewis as actor and directorImage: STF/AFP/Getty Images
The documentary “From Darkness to Light” by German-Australian documentary filmmaker Eric Friedler sheds light on the film’s history, shows the making of the film and Jerry Lewis’ decades-long struggle with his work. The documentary contains several minutes of original material as well as one of the last interviews Lewis gave about the film before his death.
In Venice, the documentary is shown in the Classics section, which is dedicated to documentaries about cinema.
The “mad professor” wants to be taken seriously
Lewis, who died in 2017 at the age of 91, was a legend of US show business. He became world famous through his slapstick comedies such as “Cinderfella” (German title: Aschenblödel) and “The Nutty Professor”. In the early 1970s – his career had stalled – he wanted to be taken more seriously.
Jerry Lewis became famous with slapstick and grimacesImage: Richter Collection/picture alliance
He was offered the lead role in “The Day The Clown Cried,” based on a script by publicist and later television producer Joan O’Brien and Charles Denton, then television critic for the Los Angeles Examiner. The already gruesome story was to end with the clown deciding one day to accompany the children on their way to the gas chambers and die with them. Mind you, it was supposed to be a comedy.
Something about the story seemed to appeal to Lewis, who was Jewish, and he threw himself into the work. He traveled to Dachau and Auschwitz to research it and went on a grapefruit diet to look skinny for the role. He also rewrote the script to better suit his slapstick style, adding jokes and blunders and changing the main character’s name: Karl Schmidt became Helmut Doork. “Dork” means idiot or moron in English.
“This film will never be released”
The production of “The Day The Clown Cried” was beset by legal and financial problems from the start. Lewis injected two million dollars from his now dwindling fortune. During filming in Sweden and Paris, money became tight. When production was completed, the Swedish studio held back some of the footage and the original negatives, claiming Lewis owed them $600,000.
Undeterred, Lewis returned to the US with the first rough cut of the film. He showed it to Joan O’Brien, who, as the original writer, had the final say on whether the film could be released. It didn’t go well. O’Brian was horrified by the scenes that revealed the changes the comedian had made to the original script.
Lewis (r) and French actor Pierre Etaix, who plays Doork’s rivalImage: STF/AFP/Getty Images
“She left the room crying,” says Lewis biographer Shawn Levy. “She said, ‘This film will never be released, I will never give you the rights to it.'”
Lost masterpiece or complete disaster?
Only a handful of people have seen the rough cut of “The Day The Clown Cried” and the reactions were mixed. French film critic Jean-Michel Frodon liked the film and wrote in 2016 in the Filmblog “Sences Of Cinema”:“The bizarre nature of this film is not its weakness, but its strength.” US comedian Harry Shearer, who lent his voice to several characters in the comic series “The Simpsons,” saw things differently. In an interview with “Spy Magazine” in 1992, he described the film as “drastically wrong,” and its “pathos and comedy insanely out of place.”
Did the filming already put a strain on Lewis?Image: STF/AFP/Getty Images
Lewis himself expressed mixed feelings about his work throughout his life. “This film must be seen,” he wrote in his autobiography in 1982. In 2013, he said at the Cannes Film Festival: “I am ashamed of the bad work… It was bad, bad, bad. I made a mistake.”
Eric Friedler watched numerous original film scenes for his research on “From Darkness to Light”. “I thought many scenes were great, and there were scenes that were bad, badly shot, in which [Lewis] was bad, and others in which he was really good,” Friedler said in 2016 after the premiere of ‘The Clown’, an earlier documentary about the making of “The Day The Clown Cried”. “I think he lost his way… If he’d had more time, maybe he could have found a way to turn the material into a tragedy or a tragicomedy,” Friedler said.
Why the complete film will never be shown
Lewis with his Swedish cast: Harriet Andersson plays Doork’s wife, Ulf Palme his friendImage: Express Newspapers/Getty Images
In 2015, two years before his death, Lewis donated his personal archive to the Library of Congress, including material from “The Day The Clown Cried”. The donation was, however, tied to the condition that the film material could not be shown for at least ten years. Fans who are expecting a release in 2025 will be disappointed, however, because the film cannot be released at all for legal reasons: the late screenwriter Joan O’Brien put her legal finger on it through a testamentary disposition. Lewis biographer Shawn Levy calls the film a “historical document” in an interview with DW and adds: “It will never be a commercial film.”
Maybe that’s for the best. There have been several attempts to remake the original screenplay by O’Brien and Denton. Reports suggested a Chevy would star Chase. A new version is also said to be in the works, set to be shot in Europe. But Levy believes the mystery surrounding the “lost Jerry Lewis Holocaust comedy” may be more valuable than the film itself – and so it will likely remain one of Hollywood’s greatest mysteries.
Adaptation from English: Silke Wünsch
