Comedian Jerry Lewis' Lost Holocaust Movie Discovered in Sweden

Oh man, I don't even know how to start an article like this one. See, there's this crazy story that in 1972, comedian Jerry Lewis wanted to make a movie about the Holocaust called The Day The Clown Cried.

The movie tells the haunting story of a washed-up German circus clown who is imprisoned in a Nazi concentration camp and ultimately leads Jewish children to their deaths in the gas chambers.

Yeah, it's incredibly bleak.

But the movie has been lost to time.

Let's dive in.

What Happened to The Day The Clown Cried?

Financial problems arose when the film's producer, Nat Wachsberger, allegedly ran out of money, forcing Lewis to use his own funds to complete the project. This led to a bitter and prolonged dispute over the rights to the film, a key factor in its initial non-release.

The other factor was that it was unmarketable, and apparently, Lewis himself hated the movie. The legend is that he had every copy destroyed. Reports are that he was "embarrassed" by the final product; he vowed it would never be seen.

People have said he had all the negatives destroyed, but there have been a few scenes and stories that have slipped out over time.

Comedian Harry Shearer, who saw the film in 1979 and wrote about it in Spy Magazine in 1992, described it as “if you flew down to Tijuana and suddenly saw a painting on black velvet of Auschwitz. You’d just think, ‘My God, wait a minute! It’s not funny, and it’s not good, and somebody’s trying too hard in the wrong direction to convey this strongly-held feeling.”

He also said, “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.”

Sheesh.

There's a really good documentary on the subject called From Darkness to Light that chronicles the movie and its aftermath.

- YouTubewww.youtube.com

A Lost Movie is Found

Well, apparently, the full movie has been found in Sweden. The Swedish Herald is reporting that Hans Crispin, a TV personality, producer, and actor, known for Angne & Svullo (1988), Angne & Svullo 'Här och nu! ' (1991), and Micke Dubois: Mycket mer än Svullo (2006) told Icon Magazine that he stole a copy of the film from his former workplace Europafilm in 1980.

In the report, the writer for Icon actually goes and watches the movie, confirming it is real.

The story of their heist is bonkers. Crispin took two reels but was missing the first. Then, years later, someone who knew about his heist anonymously sent him the first reel to complete the film.

To his credit, Crispin has sat on this film for 45 years, saying he was afraid having it would derail his career. His desire now is that it be added to Jerry Lewis' archive in the U.S. Library of Congress as a historical document.

Summing It All Up

There are so many lost movies out there that we should rejoice every time one is found, even one with such a weird story around it. And even if it might not be good.

For what it's worth, I do hope they add it to the Lewis archive; his heart was in the right place, even if the movie was not. And I think it says a lot about him as an artist that he understood that and wanted it destroyed.

Let me know what you think in the comments.