What a week for lost cinema. While what follows can’t be said to bring with it the weight and importance of a recently recovered Orson Welles project, the item at hand is from a much more legendary, far more controversial project: The Day the Clown Cried, a Jerry Lewis-directed, Holocaust-centered drama that has never seen the light of day, reportedly locked away in a safe owned by the director. Why? In his own estimation, the film is an embarrassment that no one should have to stand — any film which revolves, in part, around a clown entertaining children as a means of getting them inside concentration camp-bound trains always has the chance of missing — and, as recently as this year’s Cannes, he remarked, “You’ll never see it and neither will anyone else.”
We would, thus, guess that zero footage has ever been made available — despite the final script having been online for years, some kind of oversight the involved parties are willing to let go — yet Mondo Film Podcast have snatched up one incredible item: a decades-old behind-the-scenes Dutch news program that covered Lewis‘ film, a fair portion of which shows moments taken directly from Clown itself. As is, we must admit that the item isn’t “much” — the aforementioned footage; Lewis explaining part of the scoring process; a bit of makeup work; a cameo by Jane Birkin and Serge Gainsbourg — but for coming, if only in part, from one of the more legendary lost pictures in all of cinema history, this is absolutely invaluable.
And how a legend has persisted in decades since its filming. In the film’s most famous assessment — i.e., most famous by virtue of being the only which doesn’t come from Lewis or co-writer Joan O’Brien — Harry Shearer deemed Clown “a perfect object,” if only because it is “so drastically wrong, [with] its pathos and its comedy [being] so wildly misplaced, that you could not, in your fantasy of what it might be like, improve on what it really is.” (He also compared the experience, negatively, to “[flying] down to Tijuana and suddenly [seeing] a painting on black velvet of Auschwitz.”) None of that is clear, here, but it’s a hugely enticing hint of what could have been — and, for us, what probably never will be.
Have a look below:
Have you hoped to see The Day the Clown Cried? What are your thoughts on this first (and possibly only-ever) hint?