Rare Footage from Jerry Lewis' Controversial Holocaust Film 'The Day the Clown Cried'

It's unlikely that you'll see it in full, but Jerry Lewis' 1972 film The Day the Clown Cried is one of the most controversial films to never see the light of day. What's the big deal? It has Lewis as a circus clown arrested by Nazis after an ill-advised joke about Hitler, and forced to help lead unwitting Jewish children right into the concentration gas chambers. Laughing yet?

Lewis directed the film and rewrote the script, and the script leaked awhile back which is why we know how the whole thing plays out, and it's obviously hella dark. While it never got a theatrical released, the finished product has been screened private, with The Simpsons great Harry Shearer attending one and basically confirming that it's as awful as it sounds....

Shearer: "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… 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."

So yeah, this will probably never be taken out of the shadows until Lewis or original screenwriter Joan O'Brien are both long dead. Lewis has admitted to being embarrassed by it, and O'Brien has said she'll never ever let it be released.  Some leaked footage emerged last year, and now we have even more courtesy of a Dutch TV special on the making of the film. It's probably the best look we'll get for a long time, and to be honest I don't see anything here that suggests it's any worse than Roberto Benigni's Life is Beautiful. Check it out plus the footage from last year below.