Very few people have seen Jerry Lewis’ “The Day the Clown Cried.”
The unreleased 1972 film, directed by Lewis himself as an alcoholic circus clown at Auschwitz who finds redemption by entertaining children on his way to the gas chambers, has become something of an inside joke among cinephiles and comedy geeks. The sheer misguided arrogance of such an undertaking is perfectly in keeping with Lewis’s image of the later period: the sentimental telethon host, the obnoxious, naive elder statesman, the egotistical self-mythologizer.
However, critic Richard Brody
Point outIn the early 1970s, the Holocaust as we know it today was barely discussed; the term itself was not yet in widespread use. Long before Claude Lanzmann, Steven Spielberg or Roberto Benigni (who won two Oscars for the similarly premised “Life is Beautiful”), Lewis “went where no other director dared to go, to the horrific heart of modern history and confront its horrors.”
Lewis was always up for a bold venture, and in 1960 he launched his directorial career with “The Bellboy,” which he produced, wrote, directed, and starred in. It was a plotless tribute to silent-era comedies that Paramount feared would be a flop, but audiences raved about it.
Lewis continued to surpass himself as a filmmaker, not only with his unforgettable performances and stunning sets, but also with his technical mastery. Insatiably curious, Lewis prided himself on knowing everyone on his crew and knowing exactly what they were doing. This led to innovation; Lewis developed and was the first to use the now-ubiquitous Video Assist.
Lewis considered himself a “complete filmmaker” long before he became a legend.
Book of the same nameHe freely admits that his intense, all-out approach comes at a price.
When you have total personal control it is often torture. … Ultimately you may beg to have no autonomy so that the fool can make the decisions for you, so you can lie there and bleed out in peace and whine, “Look what they did to me.”
Whatever his artistic failings and personal shortcomings, it is to Lewis’s credit that he never succumbed to this temptation.
