7 Excruciating Details About Jerry Lewis’ Greatest Disaster: ‘The Day the Clown Cried’

The Day The Clown Cried, might be the most famous movie that nearly no one has seen. But could that be about to change? A complete workprint of the film has appeared from nowhere (okay, Sweden), after actor Hans Crispin revealed he stole a copy and squirreled it away in a bank vault for decades, according to the Sweden Herald. The revelation is international news, but why all the fuss?
For the uninitiated, here are seven excruciating details about The Day The Clown Cried…
Jerry Lewis Plays A Silly Clown Who Leads Jewish Children to Their Deaths
The movie’s plot in a nutshell: A circus clown (Jerry) is imprisoned in a Nazi concentration camp, where he unwittingly takes a group of children to Auschwitz and the gas chambers. Yeesh.
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Lewis thought he was all wrong for the part. According to his memoir, Jerry Lewis In Person, he resisted the overtures of producer Nat Wachsberger. “Why don’t you try to get Sir Laurence Olivier? I mean, he doesn’t find it too difficult to choke to death playing Hamlet. My bag is comedy, Mr. Wachsberger, and you’re asking me if I’m prepared to deliver helpless kids into a gas chamber? Ho-ho. Some laugh — how do I pull it off?”
Lewis Insisted That the Film Never Be Released
Lewis didn’t pull it off. The film ran into financial troubles, and the unfinished product was terrible. “You will never see it,” he told Entertainment Weekly. “No one will ever see it, because I am embarrassed at the poor work."
In another interview, Lewis reiterated that “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.”
Patton Oswalt’s Stage Version Was Shot Down
In the late 1990s, Oswalt got his mitts on the shooting script and thought it would be hilarious to stage a live reading starring Bob Odenkirk and other funny friends. The comics actually pulled it off three times at Largo, then prepared to take it to a larger venue. But hours before opening night, Oswalt was served with a cease-and-desist from a producer who’d optioned the screenplay for a remake. Instead, Odenkirk, David Cross, Paul F. Tompkins and other comics improvised a show about being canceled by an a-hole producer.
Another Famous Comedian Almost Starred in a Remake
The actor in talks to replace Lewis as the clown in the proposed remake">.
Harry Shearer Saw the Film and Called It ‘Perfect’
Shearer told Spy that he’d somehow seen a print of The Day the Clown Cried in 1979. “With most of these kinds of things, you find that the anticipation, or the concept, is better than the thing itself,” Shearer said. “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.”
Others Keep Making ‘Clowns in Concentration Camp’ Movies
Most people don’t need to see The Day The Clown Cried to cringe at the concept of a clown in a concentration camp. Yet, Roberto Benigni was yukking it up (and winning an Oscar) to shield his kid from the horrors of internment in Life Is Beautiful, while Robin Williams invented funny stories to lighten the mood in German-occupied Poland in Jacob the Liar. Maybe bad ideas come in threes.
Lewis Stipulated That No One Can See the Film — Until 2025
After all his protests that no one would ever see The Day The Clown Cried, Lewis donated five hours of footage to The Library of Congress in 2015. Crispin, the actor who allegedly stole and kept a completed workprint, wants to donate his copy to the Library of Congress as well.
After his donation, Lewis insisted that the footage remain unseen for 10 years, a ticking clock that expires right about now. Copyright issues involving some of the film’s other stakeholders remain complicated, but we might be closer than ever to experiencing a “perfect object” of bad taste.