The Venice Film Festival is also showing a documentary about “The Day the Clown Cried” – a legendary film by Jerry Lewis about the Holocaust, which will never be shown. The legendary American comedian Jerry Lewis once made a film so controversial , which was never shown to the general public.

The Day the Clown Cried, filmed in 1972, tells the story of a circus clown who is tasked with entertaining children sent to their deaths in a Nazi concentration camp.

The film’s plot is enough to spark heated debate, but the tumultuous story surrounding its production and the film’s subsequent disappearance – combined with various legal issues that will likely never allow it to be released – have reduced the film to… legend for cinephiles.

“If you just tell someone that Jerry Lewis wrote, directed and starred in a drama about a clown in a concentration camp who leads children to the gas chambers, they’ll say, ‘What? How come I’ve never heard of this movie, how come I haven’t seen it?'” says Sean Levy, author of The King of Comedy: The Life and Art of Jerry Lewis.

A new documentary, “From Darkness to Light,” set to premiere at this year’s Venice Film Festival, explores the hidden aspects of “The Day the Clown Cried” and Lewis’ complicated relationship with film. And while the documentary obviously won’t feature the entire film, there will be bits of it that have never been released before, shedding some light on one of Hollywood’s most intriguing mysteries.

The “crying teacher” tries to get serious

Lewis, who died in 2017 aged 91, was a showbiz legend who rose to fame with comedies such as Nutty Professor. In the early 1970s, however, he wanted to… get serious.

He was offered the lead role in The Day the Clown Cried, a film based on a script by television producer Joan O’Brien and then-television critic Charles Denton.

The plot concerns the story of a German circus clown in the 1940s, who is sent to a concentration camp because in one of the performances he appeared drunk and began to mock Hitler.

When he arrives at the camp, the clown takes it upon himself to entertain the children being taken to the gas chambers. In the last scene of the film the clown decides to follow the children into the gas chamber and die with them. The movie is a comedy. Supposedly.

Something about the whole story piqued the interest of Lewis, himself a Jew. The actor went to Dachau and Auschwitz concentration camps to do research for the film, and followed a special diet based on grapefruit to lose a lot of weight and better suit the role.

In addition, he changed the script quite a bit to better suit his style, adding jokes and quips, but also changing the name of the lead role from the simple German name Carl Schmidt to… Helmut Dork (dork in English means lively, stupid).

The technical and legal problems

From the first moment that the production of the film began, the legal problems began.

Nathan Waxberger, the producer hired by Lewis, did not have the rights to make the film – when Lewis arrived in Europe to begin filming, there was no longer even an option to simply adopt O’Brien’s original script and Denton.

Nevertheless, Lewis reluctantly invested $2 million of his own fortune to complete the film.

The film was shot in Paris and Sweden, but the financial margins were tight. When production wrapped, the Swedish studio claimed it hadn’t received $600,000 of the money it was owed – and decided to keep some of the footage and original negatives.

Undeterred, Lewis returned to the US and showed the film to O’Brien, who had the final say – but their meeting did not go well.

“O’Brien left the room crying, saying, ‘This is never going to air, I’m never going to give you the rights.’ When she died, she also wrote it in her will: The film must never be shown,” Levy says.

“From Darkness to Light,” directed by American Michael Lurie and German Eric Friedler, has several minutes of footage from Lewis’s film, as well as an interview Lewis gave about the film shortly before he died.

A lost masterpiece or an absolute disaster?

Few claim to have seen the scenes Lewis shot for The Day the Clown Cried – and reactions vary.

French film critic Jean-Michel Fradon has stated that he saw a scene in the early 2000s and was enthralled.

In 1982 Lewis wrote in his autobiography that “the film must be shown” – but in 2013 at an event at the Cannes Film Festival he told the audience that “no one will ever see the film because I am ashamed of the bad job done… It was bad, bad, bad. I was wrong.”

“I’ve seen quite a few of the original scenes, and there were some scenes that I thought were amazing and some scenes that were bad, poorly shot, where Lewis acted badly, and in others he was really good,” Friedler said in 2016 after the premiere of “The clown’, another documentary about ‘The Day the Clown Cried’. “I think he lost his way. […] Perhaps if he had more time he would find a way to create a drama or a tragic comedy out of the material at hand.”

According to Friedler, the film could be a monumental Holocaust comedy almost 30 years before Roberto Benigni’s Oscar-winning Life is Good. But Lewis was “never given the opportunity” for such a thing.

Why can’t the movie be shown yet?

In 2015, two years before his death, Lewis donated his personal archive, including material from The Day the Clown Cried, to the US Library of Congress. Along with this, however, Lewis set an additional condition that the material cannot be shown for at least the next 10 years.

Of course, those hoping that the film will be released next year will be disappointed. The library has confirmed that it only has some of the film’s negatives, around 90 minutes of unedited footage with no sound, as well as behind-the-scenes footage.

But even if the library had the entire film or could somehow, for example with the help of artificial intelligence, add the voices and “assemble” the film, again because of O’Brien’s will it could not be shown . As Levy explains, the existing footage “is a historical document, but it will never become a commercial film.”

There have been several attempts to make a film based on O’Brien and Denton’s original screenplay. In fact, it is supposed that a new film with this script is being planned, which will be shot in Europe. But according to Levy, the mystery surrounding “Jerry Lewis’ lost Holocaust comedy” may be more valuable than the film itself.

“Even if the film became a success, even if it was on the level of ‘Schindler’s List,’ a true masterpiece, it would gradually lose its greatness,” Levy says. “The fact that we will never be able to see her means she will never lose any of her magic.”

Edited by: Giorgos Passas