One of the most infamous films ever made - and never seen - is Jerry Lewis’ The Day The Clown Cried, the comedian’s 1972 attempt at making a serious film, in which a clown works at a Nazi concentration camp during the Holocaust. While footage of the film itself is impossible to see, behind-the-scenes clips miraculously appeared on YouTube over the weekend, leaving cinema fans in disbelief.
The footage comes from a Flemish television show, complete with narration and a short interview with Lewis himself. Lewis can be seen explaining why he plays music on the set to help get his actors in the mood. He says that he thought it was an original idea until Charlie Chaplin told him that he did the same thing.
There are also scenes of Lewis in makeup as the clown and footage of him getting prepared. However, there is no footage that made the final film in the seven-minute clip.
Badass digest was one of the sites that discovered the clip, which was uploaded by YouTube user unclesporkums on Saturday. It’s been viewed over 120,000 times already.
According to HitFix’s Drew McWeeny, the film was written by Joan O'Brien and Charles Denton and centers on Helmut Doork, a clown who winds up in a concentration camp after he publicly criticizes Hitler. There, his talents are taken advantage of by the Nazis, who have him entertain children as they are sent to die. The film has rarely been seen, although comedian Harry Shearer once wrote that he did see it.
Lewis will likely never allow it to be seen while he’s still alive. “It was all bad and it was bad because I lost the magic,” Lewis said at the Cannes Film Festival this year, notes Reuters. “You will never see it, no-one will ever see it, because I am embarrassed at the poor work.”
In other words, the fascinating clip included below is the closest we’ll ever get to seeing this film.
image: YouTube