Comedy legend Jerry Lewis is known for a great many things: his shrill and oft-imitated stage persona, his lengthy collaboration with crooner Dean Martin, his over 50-year stint as the host of The Muscular Dystrophy Association’s telethon, and of course, his many classic films. But although The Nutty Professor, The Bellboy and The King of Comedy may have cemented his place in cinematic history, there was one film that Lewis seemed eager for history to forget: The Day the Clown Cried.
Completed in 1972 but never publicly screened, The Day the Clown Cried starred Lewis as a clown imprisoned in a Nazi concentration camp, who becomes responsible for entertaining Jewish children before they entered a gas chamber. Production troubles and a decidedly disturbing concept – and Lewis’s assertion that “No one will ever see it, because I am embarrassed at the poor work” at a 2013 press conference – led many film aficionados to believe that Lewis’s film would never been seen by the public… a belief that will be proven wrong. Eventually.
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According to a report at The Los Angeles Times, The Library of Congress has recently acquired a collection of Jerry Lewis’s film, including The Day the Clown Cried. Unfortunately there is also a major caveat: the film cannot be screened for another ten years, when Lewis will be 99 years old.
As film lovers prepare to eat right and exercise just to make certain they’re around to see it, they may wish to be warned. A select few people who have seen The Day the Clown Cried consider it a disaster. The Simpsons star Harry Shearer is one of them, and told Spy Magazine the following:
“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.”
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William Bibbiani (everyone calls him ‘Bibbs’) is Crave’s film content editor and critic. You can hear him every week on The B-Movies Podcast and watch him on the weekly YouTube series Most Craved and What the Flick. Follow his rantings on Twitter at @WilliamBibbiani.
