In 1972, Jerry Lewis made most of a movie called The Day the Clown Cried, which may well be the most famous never-completed film of all time. Set in a Nazi concentration camp, its very premise — Jerry as a clown who entertains Jewish children before they're put to death — appalled some, especially because it was Jerry. The premise doesn't seem quite as impossible these days; not since Roberto Benigni's 1997 Life is Beautiful, which was about much the same thing, won critical acclaim and the Oscar as Best Foreign Film.
As I hear the story, Jerry's film was underfinanced from the start thanks to producers who didn't have the money they said they had. A week or three before shooting would have been finished, funds ran out. Jerry briefly tried to keep filming using his own money but his legal advisors stopped him. The ownership of the work was in question and he might well have poured a fortune into it, completed the picture and been unable to do anything with it. Filming shut down and for a time he hoped the attorneys could straighten things out so he could take the picture to some other studio and get the balance of the work financed and then have the whole thing distributed. None of that was possible. Joan O'Brien, who'd written the novel on which the movie was based, wanted the whole thing buried. The people who saw completed scenes thought they were dreadful. And the legal situation never did get resolved.
At some point, Jerry realized he had to give up on it. He couldn't get its ownership cleared up and even if he could, no one wanted the film. Too many articles had appeared about what a monstrosity it was. And eventually, he and a few other actors had aged enough that even if he did go back and shoot the additional scenes he felt were necessary, they wouldn't match.
So that was the end of that…but not really. The film attained legendary status in town, and a privileged few saw (and expressed unanimous horror at) a version Jerry had edited together of as much of the finished movie as he could muster. No, I was not among the few. Neither were a couple of my friends who were desperate to see this movie.
I witnessed this desperation first hand with one friend. One day back when we all had our video on VHS tapes, I was printing up fancy labels for some of my homemade recordings. The labels came on a sheet of twelve and I had eleven to print…so I was going to waste one label on the page. On a whim, I used the last one, printed THE DAY THE CLOWN CRIED on it and slapped it on an old cassette I was otherwise going to toss. I put the tape on my shelf of movies, spine out for all the world to see. I just wanted to see if anyone would notice.
No one did until a few months later. A friend came by and was waiting in my video room while I got ready so we could leave for a restaurant where we were meeting others. Suddenly, he saw the tape. He yanked it off the shelf, thrust it at me and yelled, "PUT THIS ON! I must see this movie!" I started to tell him he didn't but he interrupted and shouted, "NOW! I must see this movie NOW!!!"
Imagine if you will that some evil villain has tricked you into drinking a fast-acting poison. Imagine you're getting dizzy and your knees are buckling. Imagine that your only hope is an antidote and that the only clue as to where and what that antidote is is on a videotape. Imagine how you'd act in that situation, then triple the intensity and you have an approximation of how my friend acted at that moment. He was five seconds from knocking me to the floor and jamming the tape into my VCR himself.
I finally explained to him that it was a joke. He didn't believe me and I had to run a little of the tape to show him it was not what the label said. I thought he was going to cry.
No, our little Bonus Video Link here is not to the complete extant version of the Jerry Lewis non-masterpiece. But here's a little excerpt from a recent Q-and-A Jerry did where he actually spoke of the picture in humble terms. For a long time, he refused to discuss it at all…
And here's about seven minutes of random footage from the set that has surfaced. You can't judge the film's merits from this but it's all you're likely to ever see of the most famous movie that never quite existed…
