Tears of a clown as critics revisit Jerry Lewis’s lost film

Jerry Lewis was a comedy god in the 40s, 50s and
 60s. His man-child act, gurning, squeaky voice and physical dexterity made him the most popular star of his type.

Though even attempting to categorise 87-year-old Lewis is an exercise in futility.

He was and remains unique, his mass appeal a mystery, his longevity the butt of countless jokes from people who don’t “get” him.

There are those who witnessed his on-stage antics at Tribeca – wheeling out calcified vaudeville gags, a red nose and other bits of business from comedy’s cobwebbed vault – who claim he is out of touch and has been for the best part of 50 years.

They point to The Day the Clown Cried, considered the holy grail of lost films, 
as evidence of Lewis’s 
hubris.

It’s a movie perhaps only a dozen people have ever watched. And it remains unseen at Lewis’s request due to its contentious subject matter.

In 1972 for his 41st film Lewis decided to do a straight drama.

He selected The Day the Clown Cried, the story of a circus clown incarcerated in Auschwitz who decides to make the last days of a group of children as happy as they can be.

The film’s closing sequence is said to show Lewis, in a greasepaint smile as Helmut Doork, leading children by the hands into the gas chambers. He dies with them.

The film was said to be so bad that it was unreleasable. Other observers claimed it was seized by the authorities in Sweden (where it was 
shot), as various bills were unpaid.

Still more believe screenwriter Joan O’Brien acted to block the film believing it was a gross misrepresentation of her work.

Yet Lewis’s project was conceived 25 years before Roberto Benigni did something similar in 
Life is Beautiful which itself may have been more palatable after Steven Spielberg made Schindler’s List in 1993.

Was Lewis wrong to 
attempt something so apparently ill-judged? Was America – and the rest of the world – unprepared for what he was putting on the screen?

Forty years later is the 
time right for the film to be viewed objectively, dispassionately and with the benefit of four decades of hindsight?

Or should our curiosity be tempered by comments from the few that have seen it: that The Day the Clown Cried is just a bad movie?

Jerry Lewis has spent more than half a lifetime refusing to allow this most personal of projects to be publicly projected.

Now in his tenth decade he is unlikely to change his mind.