An Infamous Lost Jerry Lewis Movie May Finally See The Light Of Day

Film history is sadly rife with instances of lost movies. These are films that, either through accident or indifference, have seemingly vanished from existence. Film lovers hold out hope that some intrepid archivist will track down a print of, say, Orson Welles' cut of "The Magnificent Ambersons" or Tod Browning's silent horror picture "London After Midnight" (starring Lon Chaney as a terrifying figure with razor-sharp teeth), but with each passing year, it feels less and less likely that there's a copy waiting to be rescued from a mislabeled can in some South American storage facility.

The most infamous lost film of all time was, for many decades, not technically lost at all. It was simply unseeable. I'm referring, of course, to Jerry Lewis' "The Day the Clown Cried," a World War II drama about a German clown who, after being sent to a concentration camp for making light of Adolf Hitler, finds a measure of solace in entertaining young Jewish children. This minor comfort is cruelly shattered when the camp's commandant orders him to lure the children onto a train bound for Auschwitz and, ultimately, into a gas chamber.

Lewis shot "The Day the Clown Cried" in 1972 and had an offer to premiere the film at the 1973 Cannes Film Festival, but he was unhappy with the finished product and essentially locked the film in a vault. The deathly serious subject matter, combined with Lewis' poor critical reputation in the United States (where his zany shtick had curdled into heinous self-parody), gradually turned the movie into a must-see disaster — and the longer Lewis held out, the more extravagantly awful the film became in the collective cinephile imagination. This perception was all but validated when comedian Patton Oswalt got ahold of the screenplay and held secret staged readings in Hollywood (until he was hit with a cease-and-desist).

When Lewis died in 2017, there was hope that the Library of Congress, to which he had donated all existing "The Day the Clown Cried" material in his possession two years prior, would arrange for the movie to be shown in 2024 (per Lewis' stipulation). Alas, there was no finished cut of the movie, at which point 50 years of feverish anticipation suddenly went poof.

Amazingly, though, all hope is not lost. A Swedish actor has now revealed that he possesses a complete cut of "The Day the Clown Cried." Will he share it with the rest of the world? Can he? This might prove to be tricky.

In an interview with SVT (via The National), Swedish actor Hans Crispin claimed that he stole a workprint of "The Day the Clown Cried" from Europafilm in 1980. He subsequently made a VHS dupe and has clandestinely screened the movie for friends over the years. He keeps his copy in a bank vault but is open to sharing it with the rest of the world. According to Crispin, "It must be seen!"

To prove he wasn't a hoaxer, Crispin showed his copy to a journalist from SVT and one from Icon Magazine. Now that he's gone public with his big secret, he told the publication, "I think I want to hand it over to the next generation. With today's technique, it can be restored. I want to sell it to a serious producer who either restores it or keeps it locked away, or restores it and shows it to people for studying purposes."

An attempted sale could potentially introduce numerous rights issues that might keep Crispin's copy from ever seeing the light of a projector. As for what Lewis would've wanted, he was inconsistent regarding his wishes over the years. "It was all bad, and it was bad because I lost the magic," he said at the 2013 Cannes Film Festival (via Entertainment Weekly). "You will never see it. No one will ever see it, because I am embarrassed at the poor work." However, writing in his 1982 autobiography "Jerry Lewis: In Person," the filmmaker stated that "the picture must be seen."

TCM viewers got a tantalizing look at "The Day the Clown Cried" when the cable channel aired the documentary "From Darkness to Light" in 2024. At the time, that felt like the most complete examination of the film we'd ever get, but Crispin has definitely changed the game. We'll have to wait and see how he proceeds (and whether he's slammed with lawsuits), but for now, keep in mind what Harry Shearer told Spy in 1992 about his experience viewing the movie:

"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."

May this perfect object at long last be made available to the public. It can't possibly do more damage to Lewis' reputation than he did personally throughout his long life (he's probably best known to young people nowadays as the old fart comedian who thought women couldn't be funny). It also can't undo the legitimate greatness of classics like "The Nutty Professor," "The Bellboy," and "The Ladies' Man," or the indelible nastiness of his performance in Martin Scorsese's "The King of Comedy." It is time for the world to see "The Day the Clown Cried."