I Discuss The Day The Clown Cried

Here's something different from me; no movie review, although if it ever did come out I sure as hell would watch it. I will say a few words about the infamous movie The Day The Clown Cried, made in '72 and never released.


If you don't know this movie, it was made (or mostly made, depending on what you hear) to be released in 1972. It starred and was directed by Jerry Lewis and was about a German clown who gets thrown into a concentration camp during World War II for insulting Hitler and his fellow prisoners do not find him funny (insert your own comments about Lewis if you wish). However, the Jewish kids find him amusing so he entertains them. The guards try to thwart that. Eventually, Jerry (named Helmut Doork!) accidentally gets sent to Auschwitz and he gets asked to lead the kids into the ovens, the end; YIKES.


You can read more about the movie's history in a scan of a magazine story here, but a big reason why only a few people have ever seen the movie is that the producer who said he had the rights to the script and funded the movie... not only did he run out of money and Jerry had to pay for production out of his pocket, but the producer did not actually have the rights to the script. That's a mess which prevented the movie from being completed and with those rights issues, what a complicated thing.


Another reason has to be that apparently the movie is really awful; he rarely talks about it but Lewis has admitted as such in recent times; the rare few who have watched it have said the same thing, that it looks really cheap and wrong, and everything about it is misguided, so as noble as it may be to make a movie on such a serious topic, it is a complete disaster.


Until recently there was no footage of the movie to be seen in pubic aside from some brief behind the scene clips. Suddenly, some guy on YouTube somehow found on a Danish website (that website is here) 7 minutes from a behind the scenes look of the movie made by a Dutch TV station, and it actually has a brief amount of footage from the movie, albeit nothing that sounds really wrong with the story; it's just Jerry as a clown doing some visual humor that actually is humorous.The rest is behind the scenes stuff. This is a huge deal to big film buffs as this is the first actual footage to be seen by the public. The amazing thing is that on the Dutch site, it is dated as being posted in April of 2012 and yet no one realized or found this until a few days ago.


Say what you will about Lewis or his comedy (I've seen little of it but from what I know... I probably wouldn't be a fan) but the annual telethon he does for charity is a noble thing so I won't be too hard on him. Who knows for certain if the public will ever get to see the movie, but it was nice to be tantalized and finally see something from it when it seemed unlikely that we would see any footage from the movie.



I'll be back Thursday afternoon with a proper review... unless something else major like this pops up between now and then.