Years before Roberto Benigni mocked the Holocaust with Life is Beautiful, American icon Jerry Lewis took a crack at his lighter look at Nazi Germany with The Day The Clown Cried.
Directed and starring Lewis back in 1972, the film focused on a circus clown (Lewis) who is imprisoned in a Nazi concentration camp, who takes on the task of leading children into the gas chambers hoping to alleviate their fears.
Sounds fun, huh?
The film was a bit of a mess, with the production running out of money and the final product’s actual ownership in contention. According to Lewis himself, “You will never see it. No one will ever see it, because I am embarrassed at the poor work.”
A bit of a holy grail among cinegeeks, the film has been publicly, but has been screened at least a few times. Comedian Harry Shearer saw it in 1979; “With most of these kinds of things, you find that the anticipation, or the concept, is better than the thing itself. But seeing this film was really awe-inspiring, in that you are rarely in the presence of a perfect object. This was a perfect object. This movie is so drastically wrong, its pathos and its comedy are so wildly misplaced, that you could not, in your fantasy of what it might be like, improve on what it really is. “Oh My God!” — that’s all you can say.”
Last August, some of the first behind the scenes footage leaked online for the first time and just this morning, our friends over at TV Store Online tipped us off that additional footage has been released, now totaling fourteen minutes (as well as the very first look ever of the film itself).
After the jump, read the screenplay for this car wreck or even better, invite some friends over and stage a reading.
Clown makeup and swastikas not included.
