The Day the Clown Cried
| The Day the Clown Cried | |
|---|---|
| Directed by | Jerry Lewis |
| Written by | Joan O'Brien (Novel) Charles Denton Jerry Lewis |
| Produced by | Nat Waschberger |
| Starring | Jerry Lewis Harriet Andersson |
Release date | Unreleased |
Running time | Unknown |
| Language | English |
The Day the Clown Cried is an unfinished and unreleased 1972 film directed by and starring Jerry Lewis. It is based on a book of the same name by Joan O'Brien, who had co-written the original script ten years prior. Based upon the controversy noted below, it has became somewhat infamous among film historians and movie buffs for a film that has never officially been released.
Plot
Template:Spoiler Lewis plays a depressed, formerly great German circus clown named Helmut Doork, who is past his prime and has little-to-no respect. After getting fired for causing a mishap during one performance, he is caught by the Gestapo for drunkenly mocking the Führer, and imprisoned in a Nazi camp for political prisoners. He tries to keep his bravado up among the other inmates by bragging what a famous performer he was. His only friend is a good-hearted German named Keltner, whom we are never sure what he did to be put in prison. The others goad him into performing for them, but he does not, realizing that he is, in fact, terrible. Frustrated, they beat him up and leave him in the courtyard to sulk about his predicament. Suddenly, he sees a group of Jewish children laughing at him from the other side of the camp, where the Jews are kept away from everyone else. Feeling delighted to be appreciated again, Helmut performs for them and gains quite an audience, until the prison commandant orders that he must be stopped.
After the S.S guard break up his latest performance, they knock him out cold and start beating the children away from the barbed-wire fence. Horrified at what they are doing to children, Keltner defeats a guard in a fight, but he killed with one shot to the head. Helmut, meanwhile, is placed in solitary confinment. Seeing a use for him, the commandant assigns him to help load Jewish children on trains leading out of the internment camp. By a twist of fate, he ends up accidentally accompanying the children on a train to Auschwitz, and he is eventually used, in almost Pied Piper fashion, to help lead Jewish children to their deaths in the gas chamber.
Offered his freedom if he fulfills this request, Helmut reluctantly obliges to do so. Leading them to the "showers," he becomes increasingly dependent on a miracle, only to learn there is none. After all the children go into the chamber, he is so filled with remorse for what he has done that he goes into the room himself to entertain them. The probable reason why he does this is that he wished to take back all the bad things he had done, but according to O'Brien, it may have been for his own ego. As the children laugh while he performs, every one of them dies quietly of the effects of Zyklon B.
Cast
Jerry Lewis - Helmut Doork Harriet Andersson - Ada Doork Anton Diffring - Captain Curt Runkel Ulf Palme - Johann Keltner
Production
Principal photography began on the film in 1972, but the producer Nathan Wachsberger not only ran out of money before completing the film, but his option to produce the film had expired before filming began. Lewis paid to finish shooting the film, but the parties involved in its production were never able to come to terms which would allow the film to be released.
Lewis reportedly has the only known videocassette copy of the film, which he keeps in his office. According to friends and associates, he refuses to talk about the making of the film whatsoever, because he is not proud of the overall product.
Criticism and Changes
Although never seen publically, the film became a source of legend almost immediately after its production. Controversy centered around both its widely-rumored poor taste and insensitivity, and the role it may have played in Lewis suspending his nearly 25-year film career.[citation needed]
A May 1992 article in Spy magazine quotes a friend of Lewis, comedian and actor Harry Shearer, who saw a rough cut of the film 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.
Shearer also goes on to point out why Lewis would make the film: he believed "the Academy can't ignore this." Upon seeing the rough cut, he told Lewis the film was "terrible," which reportedly made him furious. When asked to sum up the experience of the film overall, he responded by saying that the closest he could come was like "if you flew down to Tijuana and suddenly saw a painting on black velvet of Auschwitz. You'd just think 'My God, wait a minute! It's not funny, and it's not good, and somebody's trying too hard in the wrong direction to convey this strongly-held feeling."
The article quoted O'Brien as saying the rough cut she saw was a "disaster"; it also says she and the original script's other writer, Charles Denton, will never allow the film to be released, in part due to changes in the script made by Lewis which made the clown more sympathetic and Emmett Kelly-like. In the original script, the protagonist was an arrogant, self-centered clown named Karl Schimdt, who was "a real bastard," according to O'Brien. Her script reportedly had him trying to use his wife, who knew the ringmaster, to get him a better gig, and he apparently informed on nearly everyone he knew after being interrogated for mocking Hitler. She stated that the original draft was about a selfish man becoming enlightened and redeeming himself, but that Lewis practically changed the entire story into a Chaplinesque dark comedy.
Recent Events
In the early-1980s, Jim Wright revealed to the press of his plan to produce a new version of "The Day the Clown Cried", and he mentioned he had Richard Burton in mind for the title role. Despite major buzz about the project, nothing concrete came through the planning stages. By 1991, producer Michael Barclay announced that he and Tex Rudloff were preparing a joint production of "Clown" with the Russian film studio Lenfilm. Allegedly, Robin Williams had been offered the leading role and given a copy of the script. Jeremy Kagan, who made The Chosen, reportedly was slated to direct the film, but once again, the idea was dropped before it was officially "green lit". (Williams later made his own concentration camp drama Jakob the Liar) In 1994, William Hurt was considered to play Doork, but nothing major came to frution.
As for Jerry Lewis, he never gave up hope that his unseen pet project would be seen. According to a chapter in his autobiography Dean & Me, he was trying to clear the litigation so he could return to Sweden for some pick up shots of the exterior of buildings, edit the rough cut, have a score and title created, and get it released. "One way or another, I'll get it done," he writes. "The picture must be seen, and if by nobody else, at least by every kid in the world who's only heard there was such a thing as the Holocaust."
Trivia
- Spy also reported Milton Berle, Dick Van Dyke, and Bobby Darin were among those who had considered playing the clown during the years before Lewis got involved.
- In a rather obscure joke, the film (and Lewis) are the subject of a sketch from Animaniacs entitled "Heart of Twilight" that also spoofs Apocalypse Now. It features Lewis (as Mr. Director) as a Colonel Kurtz-type character making a movie called The Crying Clown against the wishes of the studio in an isolated sound stage.
- Jerry Lewis lost 40 pounds to prepare for his role.
- An episode of Batman: The Animated Series, "The Man Who Killed Batman", makes a slight reference to the film. When Batman is believed to have been deceased, The Joker holds a funeral and starts the eulogy with "Dear friends, today is the day the clown cried...."
- In Jon Stewart's America: The Book, one of the secret sections located beneath the White House is a screening room for the film.
- All accounts indicate the film was a sincere attempt at drama, but the subject matter and reports of how it was treated strangely mirror the purposeful poor taste of the Springtime for Hitler Broadway show depicted in The Producers.
See also
External links
- Film summary from The Official Jerry Lewis Comedy Museum
- Extensive details about the film, from a fan's website, including
- a draft of the script (in zipped Word format)
- a May 1992 article about the film from Spy Magazine
- The Day The Clown Cried at IMDb