30 Minutes of ‘The Day The Clown Cried’ Surfaces

June 17, 2016 7:49 AM

Lewis wrote, directed, and starred in the movie in 1972, but he never released the finished product. The reasons given for its disappearance vary, and could overlap; legal battles, rights issues, and the fact that the movie was about Jerry Lewis as a German clown who leads Jewish children into the gas chambers during the Holocaust.

Like a beacon of weird, misjudged light in the darkness, 30 minutes of the film have suddenly appeared online. It’s cobbled together from various sources, mostly a German documentary about the making of the film. Missing material is filled in with title cards. Even in this form, The Day the Clown Cried is still hopelessly incomplete. But there’s more here than I’ve ever seen before. And for the next eight years, it might be the best we look we get at one of the rarest movies ever made.

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posted by incomple (30 comments total)

For contrast, witness the astonishingly brilliant opening credits of his final film (as a director), Cracking Up.
posted by incomple at 7:54 AM on June 17, 2016 [8 favorites]

Nope. Waiting until I can see the whole thing, the way God intended.

I don't think very highly of God, so I'm willing to ascribe this thing to Him.
posted by Etrigan at 8:01 AM on June 17, 2016 [9 favorites]

Covered at Cracked.com (#1).
posted by Melismata at 8:16 AM on June 17, 2016

If I've said it once, I've said it a hundred times: what's missing in Salò is Jerry Lewis.
posted by octobersurprise at 8:36 AM on June 17, 2016 [10 favorites]

what's missing in Salò is Jerry Lewis.

Would he be one of the Nazis? Or one of the "youths"?
posted by Ashwagandha at 8:47 AM on June 17, 2016

I still think it's less weird than his film adaptation of Kurt Vonnegut's Slapstick.
posted by Atom Eyes at 8:52 AM on June 17, 2016 [1 favorite]

Would he be one of the Nazis? Or one of the "youths"?

He would be one of the clowns.
posted by octobersurprise at 8:57 AM on June 17, 2016 [2 favorites]

I still think it's less weird than his film adaptation of Kurt Vonnegut's Slapstick.

Or his remake of The Jazz Singer featuring his mediocre Sinatra impression.

That being said, bad Jerry Lewis is my catnip. Without the baked-in affectionate cynicism of Dean Martin, Lewis could give himself over to total, hamfisted, embarrassing, inappropriate schmaltz. It's Jewish kitsch, and I have been desperate to see this film, the nee plus ultra of Lewis bad taste.

There's a reason both The King of Comedy and Funny Bones presented Lewis as a terrible, terrible man. To his credit, Lewis knew what they were doing and played the hell out of it.
posted by maxsparber at 9:08 AM on June 17, 2016 [4 favorites]

Like a beacon of weird, misjudged light in the darkness, 30 minutes of the film have suddenly appeared online. It’s cobbled together from various sources, mostly a German documentary about the making of the film.

This is very misleading. It's not "30 minutes of the film," it's 30 minutes of (presumably) the German documentary, with occasional bits of the film overdubbed in German (or with German voiceover discussing it). I mean, it's not nothing, but the experience of watching the linked 30-minute clip has essentially nothing to do with actually watching 30 minutes of the film, so consider this a warning.
posted by languagehat at 9:12 AM on June 17, 2016 [9 favorites]

My God incomple- that intro is amazing. And wonderful. The design, the music, and everything! And the credit for the person who 'sang' the intro song...heh.
posted by davidmsc at 9:23 AM on June 17, 2016 [1 favorite]

Asking "what was he thinking?" assumes he was thinking at all. I will grant you that the unwillingness to release the film implies thought-like processes did eventually occur.
posted by tommasz at 9:29 AM on June 17, 2016 [3 favorites]

Here's the script.
posted by I-baLL at 9:32 AM on June 17, 2016 [3 favorites]

I love that intro to Cracking Up - the set is so beautiful, while also being a vicious send-up of contemporary design and its fetish for unique textures at the expense of being livable. The camera work is fantastic here, too, showcasing the otherworldly space with elegant static shots and letting Jerry just exist in them.
posted by Slap*Happy at 9:34 AM on June 17, 2016 [3 favorites]

So, it's a bad ass clown movie (the hyphen works in any location!)
posted by yhbc at 9:41 AM on June 17, 2016 [6 favorites]

Asking "what was he thinking?" assumes he was thinking at all.

I have to believe that Lewis was wayyyy up his own rear-end when he was writing this, and truly believed he was writing something deeply poetic and telling an important metaphorical tale. At least, I hope that was it.

I'm not a fan of Lewis' movies, but, when something is this horrifically and obviously wrong, I want to find some reasonable excuse.
posted by Thorzdad at 9:47 AM on June 17, 2016 [1 favorite]

You know, when you absentmindedly read this initially as something Jerry LEE Lewis did, it's a bit of a startling experience.
posted by angeline at 9:55 AM on June 17, 2016 [9 favorites]

ALSO - back to Cracking Up - good grief, comedy can be painful. Great physical comic actors -- Lewis, the 3 Stooges, John Ritter -- sometimes went though a lot of pain to make us laugh.
posted by davidmsc at 9:58 AM on June 17, 2016 [2 favorites]

IIRC Shemp Howard finally told Moe to fuck off and quit the Stooges because he was tired of being beaten up.
posted by Splunge at 10:28 AM on June 17, 2016 [1 favorite]

What an abortion of taste and decency.
posted by boo_radley at 10:50 AM on June 17, 2016 [1 favorite]

OMG that scene from Cracking Up! I saw this scene as a young teenager, somehow knowing that I wasn't supposed to like Jerry Lewis, and was delighted to discover that it was one of the funniest things I'd ever seen. I thought I'd never encounter it again -- I had no recollection of what the movie was, all I remembered was that couch. Thank you incomple !
posted by treepour at 2:30 PM on June 17, 2016 [1 favorite]

I suspect this dreadful concept for a film was inspired, for lack of a better word, by the real life story of Janusz Korczak, the orphanage manager who went with his charges into the gas chamber.

Not sure if I'm defending Lewis or damning him with that observation.
posted by ocschwar at 5:17 PM on June 17, 2016 [4 favorites]

"Dick Butkus as Anti-Smoking Enforcer"
posted by rhizome at 5:33 PM on June 17, 2016

I thought that was going to be about this Cracking Up, which I've been wanting to see for years.
posted by rhizome at 5:35 PM on June 17, 2016 [1 favorite]

Someone mind unpacking the horribleness of this movie concept for me? The few minutes of footage that I saw don't exactly suggest that it would have been/will be a great film, but I'm trying to figure out what I'm missing and why I'm not reacting as negatively.
posted by christopherious at 6:27 PM on June 17, 2016

You'll want to start at the beginning.
posted by rhizome at 6:43 PM on June 17, 2016 [1 favorite]

oschwar - oh. I had no idea, wow.

Korczak had been offered sanctuary on the “Aryan side” by Żegota but turned it down repeatedly, saying that he could not abandon his children. On 5 August he again refused offers of sanctuary, insisting that he would go with the children. He stayed with the children all the way until the end.

I am not processing this with my usual aplomb.
posted by Slap*Happy at 7:38 PM on June 17, 2016 [1 favorite]

Bear in mind this man was Dr. Seuss to an entire generation of German-speaking, Polish-speaking, Yiddish-speaking children, and he chose to spend his life running an orphanage for jewish kids in Poland. He then chose to end his life with them, despite being offered a way out at every step by his fans in The Reich, some of them barely out of childhood.

He said no. He comforted his charges all along the way. He went with them wherever they were sent.

Wow. I don't know if I could ever be that good of a human being. I'd like to think so, tho.
posted by Slap*Happy at 7:56 PM on June 17, 2016 [5 favorites]

Jeeze, as if clowns did not have a bad enough rap already.
posted by dougzilla at 11:07 AM on June 18, 2016

I cannot hear the name jerry lewis anymore without thinking of the animaniacs. He appeared in a number of episodes, but my fave is still Hearts of Twilight.
posted by SecretAgentSockpuppet at 3:42 AM on June 19, 2016

On reflection, Hello Nice Warners has more Jerry and less fruenlaven... I mean, it's no clowns in gas chambers, but we go to youtube with the jerry we have, maybe not the jerry we want.
posted by SecretAgentSockpuppet at 4:13 AM on June 19, 2016