NATHAN WEINBENDER:
A few weeks ago, and with little fanfare, Turner Classic Movies aired a documentary that caught a white whale of film history.
Jerry Lewis’s unfinished and unreleased 1972 film The Day the Clown Cried has developed such a mystique around it that it’s practically an urban legend. From Darkness to Light, directed by Eric Friedler and Michael Lurie, is more than a look at why the movie got buried: It contains the most footage of the film that has ever been made public.
Had it been released, The Day the Clown Cried would have been Lewis’s first attempt at a serious role. He played a German circus clown who, after mocking Hitler in the midst of WWII, is thrown into a Nazi POW camp, and then finds himself entertaining the Jewish children on the other side of the barbed wire. It was set in Germany but shot in Sweden, it combined intense drama with slapstick, and the production fell apart before shooting was completed.
Because the film never saw the light of day, because Lewis refused to talk about it, and because the premise sounded so dicey—especially coming from a comedian as broad as Jerry Lewis—a cult of morbid curiosity developed around The Day the Clown Cried. Lewis eventually said he let the movie die because it embarrassed him. But the truth, as this documentary details, is more complicated than that.
The first half of From Darkness to Light is standard stuff, although it provides a good primer about the production for anyone unfamiliar. But the filmmakers have two amazing things at their disposal: 1) A shockingly candid interview with Lewis conducted shortly before his death, and 2) the actual footage from The Day the Clown Cried. This is the most Lewis ever talked about this project on record, and he covers a lot, including his exhaustive pre-production research and his weird relationship with the actual death camp commandant he hired as a consultant.
As for what we do see of The Day the Clown Cried: it shouldn’t surprise anyone that it’s as misguided and tone-deaf as the descriptions made it sound. Of course, we’re seeing scenes out of order and out of context, and it’s possible that, had he been able to complete it, Lewis would have done reshoots or chosen alternate takes. The surviving footage, by the way, was rescued from the trash by Swedish film lab workers, who pirated it and hid it for decades.
But seeing this much footage—and it feels silly to say it—made me kind of emotional. Not because of its emotional content, but because it still exists at all. I couldn’t believe that, after all this time, I was finally laying eyes on this mythical thing. It’s like getting proof of life, or witnessing a genuine alien autopsy.
The irony of this story is that The Day the Clown Cried survives because it was killed. If it had been released 50 years ago, would anyone still be talking about it today? From Darkness to Light aired once on Turner Classic Movies, and it was available to stream for about a week before taking it down. It’s not currently available, which is in keeping with the strange saga of the movie it’s about. Keep an eye out for it to pop up again.
For Spokane Public Radio, I'm Nathan Weinbender.
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Nathan Weinbender is a co-host of Spokane Public Radio’s Movies 101, heard Friday evenings at 6:30 PM on KPBX and Saturday afternoons at 1:30 PM on KSFC.