THE STORY – Eric Friedler and Michael Lurie’s documentary explores Jerry Lewis’ unreleased 1972 Holocaust film, “The Day The Clown Cried,” shedding light on its mysterious disappearance.
THE CAST – Jerry Lewis, Martin Scorsese, Harry Shearer, Sarah Silverman & Mel Brooks
THE TEAM – Michael Lurie & Eric Friedler (Directors/Writers)
THE RUNNING TIME – 108 Minutes
In 1972, Hollywood comedian Jerry Lewis appeared on several U.S. talk shows announcing that his new film, “The Day The Clown Cried,” about a German clown in a concentration camp, would premiere at the Cannes Film Festival before receiving a stateside release later that year. However, the promised film never materialized amidst rumors that Lewis had walked off the set, taking all the existing footage with him, having reportedly lost faith in his project.
This new documentary, co-written and co-directed by Eric Friedler and Michael Lurie and premiering at the 2024 Venice Film Festival, sheds some long-awaited light on the story behind the film while dispelling and confirming various long-standing rumors. Happily for Hollywood history obsessives, it also includes jaw-dropping footage from the unfinished film.
The documentary’s coup de grace is a lengthy interview with Lewis, shot by Friedler himself a year before the actor died in 2017. This effectively allows Lewis to tell the story in his own words, interspersed with contributions from various talking heads. These range from commentators like Martin Scorsese to people who participated in the original film, such as actor Pierre Étaix and future “Betty Blue” director Jean-Jacques Beineix, who was Jerry Lewis’ assistant on part of the shoot.
By telling the story more or less chronologically, the directors allow for a degree of pleasurable shock in how some of the more astonishing details are revealed. Chief amongst these is several revelations regarding just how badly his producer, Nat Wachsberger, screwed over Lewis. Several months into the shoot, there’s also the discovery that the production hadn’t secured the rights to the story.
The film is filled with similarly mind-boggling details, such as the story – related here by an employee of a Swedish studio – of how the existing footage was saved in the first place. It’s a testament to artistic preservation that a quick-thinking archivist realized that the footage would likely be destroyed and, therefore, swiped it, sitting on it for more than 40 years.
Other delightful highlights include the fact that Harry Shearer (“This is Spinal Tap” and “The Simpsons”) appears to be one of the very few people who has ever seen a near-finished cut of the film, having somehow gained access to a bootleg VHS copy. We also find out that Lewis apparently consulted Ingmar Bergman on casting advice (it was shot in Sweden), which is how he came to cast Bergman regular Harriet Andersson as the clown’s wife.
The script does an excellent job of contextualizing both the film and Lewis himself, so it’s possible to watch the documentary without necessarily ever having seen a Lewis movie before. To that end, the film features several clips from another documentary, “The Last Laugh,” so technically, several of this film’s talking heads (such as Mel Brooks and Rob Reiner) belong to another movie entirely. That feels a little cheeky in places, but at least the film is properly credited in each instance.
On a similar note, the film’s main flaw is that it falls foul of a common made-for-TV documentary problem, whereby it effectively trails its highlights in the first five minutes and ends up repeating entire scenes as a result. As for the footage from “The Day the Clown Cried,” it is every bit as incredible as you might imagine, including a sequence where Lewis – as imprisoned German clown Helmut Doork – entertains about-to-be-gassed Jewish kids by, er, pretending his nose is caught on the barbed wire fence that separates them.
It is fascinating to hear Lewis talk about the film with nearly 45 years of hindsight, particularly in how he essentially lost faith in his project and, indeed, in his abilities as a director, even before the catastrophic production difficulties set in. However, Friedler and Lurie rightly point out that, even though the project itself may have been in poor taste, it was still the first Hollywood movie to tackle the previously taboo subject of the Holocaust – decades before the likes of “Schindler’s List” or the thematically similar “Life is Beautiful,” which of course went on to win Oscars for both Best Picture and Best Actor, among others.
In short, this is a compelling story of Hollywood hubris that’s by turns moving, shocking, and blackly funny. Whether or not “The Day the Clown Cried” will receive its planned release remains to be seen, but we can hope.
