JERRY LEWIS FOREVER : THE DAY THE CLOWN CRIED (1972) (NOT RELEASED)

As Jack Black in Richard Linklater’s “Bernie” showed most recently this past year, the right dramatic role and assured tone can create a new context for a slew of comedic actors, and rejuvenate a career that is slowly being backed into a corner. However, none of those efforts featured a Holocaust setting, a troubled production, and eventual disownment like legendary actor/director Jerry Lewis’ 1971 debacle, “The Day the Clown Cried” – a film still unseen to near-everyone, but glimpsed partially in rare behind-the-scenes footage like the material that exists today.lm centers on a German circus clown, Helmut Dorque (whom he also plays). The depressed funnyman is sent to a concentration camp, but once there, he changes course as a maniacal Pied Pieper leading children into gas chambers. The reason? They’re his best audience yet. Naturally, Lewis, thought his “Nutty Professor” fanbase would initially balk, but buy tickets in droves by the end.

Archival behind-the-scenes footage has cropped up (via Dangerous Minds), and while Lewis appears jovial and perfectly in control, the truth is he was as rightly nervous as befitting the concept. “I had been 113 days on the picture, with only three hours of sleep a night…I was exhausted, beaten,” Lewis reflected later (via Spy Magazine) on the last day, which featured him leading the gathered children to their doom. “I thought, ‘This is what my whole life has been leading to.’ I forgot about trying to direct. I had the camera run and began to walk…”

In the end, the film never finished past the rough cut phase, with the Stockholm studio keeping the negative under requirement of a $600,000 fee; elsewhere, screenwriters Joan O’Brien and Charles Denton own the copyright, and efforts to solve both problems have only created more.

Lewis owns a copy himself, on a videotape in his office. Only a select few people have seen it, including O’Brien, Denton, Harry Shearer and reporter Lynn Hirschberg. All have essentially confirmed it as mind-bogglingly misjudged. “’Oh my God’ – that’s all you can say,” said Shearer.

As for the question of the general public getting a peek anytime soon, the answer came as a swift, curt “No” from Lewis, when he was interviewed at Los Angeles’ film institution The Cinefamily. “In terms of that film, I was embarrassed,” he said. “I was ashamed of the work, and I was grateful that I had the power to contain it all and never let anyone see it. It was bad, bad, bad.”   So it seems either get in tight with Lewis for a personal sneak peek, or simply be satiated with the archival footage below – an all too fleeting glance at one of the most compelling cinematic misses around.

This is a guest post from Tabitha Vidaurri, a writer and comedinette from Brooklyn

In 1971 Jerry Lewis infamously directed and starred in a film about the Holocaust titled The Day the Clown Cried. For reasons that are still unclear, Lewis chose to depart from his trademark slapstick formula and play the role of Helmut Dorque, a German circus clown who ends up leading Jewish children to the gas chamber.

The film was never finished or released for obvious reasons (not even the French were behind him on this one). Apparently Lewis has refused to talk about Clown in interviews, which I find odd—you’d figure a comedian famous for falling down and making stupid faces would jump at the chance to discuss his utterly humorless movie about a clown in a WWII German concentration camp!

In the behind the scenes footage (see below) we get a glimpse of Lewis fulfilling his duties as a director: leading the film crew, checking the cameras, and dancing around wearing a neck brace. Ambient sound has been added to enhance the overarching sense of alienation, except it isn’t really necessary because this is footage of Jerry Lewis talking to Nazis.

This slideshow of rare production stills shows a gratuitous number of photos of Lewis in full clown makeup, and to escalate the creepiness of him posing with children he presumably later leads to their deaths, the sequence is set to doo-wop music performed by Jimmy Beaumont and the Skyliners.

Since the videos are absent of dialogue, here’s an excerpt from the script to give you a little taste of the abyss:

HELMUT (screaming at top of voice) Come back, damn you, come back. The children… they’re laughing. They’re laughing. I am a clown. I am a clown.

He turns back to the children and again bows. He quickly leans down, looks at his reflection in the puddle, and scoops up a handful of mud which he plasters on his nose to make a bulbous, artificial proboscis. He turns back to the children and in pantomime, pretends to see a fly buzzing about and tries to swat it. The imaginary fly buzzes closer. The CAMERA MOVES UP TO—CLOSE SHOT—HELMUT As the “fly” lands on his nose. He looks cross-eyed at the mud blob, then swats at it. The blob falls off.