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Jerry Lewis ‘lost’ film ‘The Day the Clown Cried’ footage surfaces online

Unseen film footage of comedian Jerry Lewis, which he vowed would never be seen by the public, has surfaced on Youtube.

The 1972 movie “The Day the Clown Cried” about a circus clown during the Holocaust was withdrawn by the actor after several disastrous test screenings. Lewis, who starred in and directed the movie, concluded that the film was beyond repair and promised to hide it forever.

“It was bad, and it was bad because I lost the magic,” said Lewis in an interview at this year’s Cannes Film Festival. “You will never see it. No one will ever see it, because I’m embarrassed at the poor work.”

The film tells the story of a German circus clown who after being arrested by the Nazis, was ordered to lead children into the gas chambers of Auschwitz as punishment.

Actor Harry Shearer, who saw a rough cut of the film, said in a 1992 Spy magazine article: “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.”

Lewis had initially thought himself wrong for the role, according to his autobiography Jerry Lewis in Person. He told producer Nathan Wachsberger, “Why don’t you try to get Sir Laurence Olivier? I mean, he doesn’t find it too difficult to choke to death playing Hamlet. My bag is comedy, Mr. Wachsberger, and you’re asking me if I’m prepared to deliver helpless kids into a gas chamber? Ho-ho. Some laugh – how do I pull it off?”

How indeed.