WHAT’S IT ABOUT
The Day the Clown Cried is one of cinema’s most notorious unreleased films, directed by and starring Jerry Lewis in 1972. This dramatic departure from Lewis’s comedic persona tells the story of Helmut Doork, a washed-up German circus clown who is imprisoned in a Nazi concentration camp for drunkenly mocking Hitler. As punishment, he is forced to entertain Jewish children as they are led to the gas chambers.
WHY IT’S GONE
Several factors have kept The Day the Clown Cried from public release. Disputes over the screenplay rights emerged between Lewis and Wachsberger. After completing a rough cut, Lewis himself decided to shelve the film permanently. In rare interviews about the project, he expressed deep dissatisfaction with the result, famously telling Entertainment Weekly in 2013: “It was bad, bad, bad. It was bad.” The few people who saw early cuts were overwhelmingly negative. Comedian Harry Shearer, one of the few to see a rough cut, described it as “drastically wrong” and “so drastically wrong-headed in its concept and its execution.” The Day the Clown Cried has never been officially released in any format. No theatrical release, no VHS, DVD, or Blu-ray release, no streaming availability on any platform, no television broadcast. In 2015, Lewis donated his personal collection of films and materials to the Library of Congress, including the rough cut of The Day the Clown Cried, with the stipulation that it not be screened publicly until at least 2025. As of today, the film remains unavailable to the general public. A few minutes of behind-the-scenes footage have leaked online over the years, and a 31-minute making-of documentary aired on Belgian television in 1972, giving curious viewers their only glimpse into this infamous production. The film has achieved mythical status among cinephiles as perhaps the most famous unseen movie in history, representing an ambitious but reportedly misguided attempt to use comedy to address the horrors of the Holocaust decades before films like Life is Beautiful would attempt similar thematic territory with greater success.