THE DAY THE CLOWN CRIED - TO BE RELEASED?

While portions of the film will be made available to scholars for research purposes, sources tell us that a screening is impossible because the Library of Congress does not have a complete cut of the film.

Cinema completionists and fans of unreleased movies appeared to receive their Holy Grail last week when reports began to circulate that “The Day the Clown Cried,” Jerry Lewis‘ infamous Holocaust movie that has never seen the light of day, would be screened at the Library of Congress in 2024.

Lewis spent decades disavowing the film, which he directed and stars in as a circus clown imprisoned in a Nazi concentration camp, but ultimately donated his footage from it to the Library of Congress in 2014. The deal stipulated that the footage could not be screened for 10 years, meaning that 2024 would be the first year that it could be made public. Lewis died in 2017.

However, a representative for the Library of Congress confirmed to IndieWire that no public screenings are planned, as the archive does not possess a complete cut of the film. The footage donated by Lewis contains several unedited scenes from the film and several sound reels (which may or may not align with the film footage), and those portions will be made available to scholars for research later this year. But anyone hoping to watch the infamous film in its entirety will have to manage their expectations.

While the mystique surrounding the film has only grown in the 50 years since production on it concluded, those who claim to have seen it have had very harsh words about it. Harry Shearer famously said that the rough cut of the film that he saw was worse than he could have imagined.

“Seeing this film was really awe-inspiring, in that you are rarely in the presence of a perfect object,” Shearer said. “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.”

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PHOTOS OF THE DAY: THE DAY THE CLOWN CRIED

One of the holy grail of movies is Jerry Lewis' The Day The Clown Cried. The 1972 film has never been released, but now that Jerry Lewis has passed away the film may be shown eventually. Here are some stills from that doomed production...

THE FATE OF THE DAY THE CLOWN CRIED

The death of US comedy legend Jerry Lewis has prompted renewed interest in his notorious "lost film", The Day the Clown Cried.

The unreleased movie follows a clown who is sent to a concentration camp and told to lead children to their deaths.

Lewis, who has died at the age of 91, gave his copy of the film to the US Library of Congress. In 2015, the library confirmed it would be shown to scholars and members of the public - but not before June 2024. Some, however, are not prepared to wait that long.

"RIP jerry lewis, release 'the day the clown cried' immediately," wrote one Twitter user.

"Is it horrible that my first thought upon hearing about Jerry Lewis's death is 'now they can release The Day The Clown Cried'?" asked Paul DeBruler.

Lewis directed the 1972 film and played the leading role - a clown who is arrested in Nazi Germany for drunkenly defaming Hitler. Lewis, who died on August 20, 2017, rarely discussed the film in interviews.

The character is then thrown into a concentration camp, where he is beaten and forced to lead children into gas chambers.

Lewis kept what is believed to be the only copy locked in a private vault before donating it to the Library of Congress.

US comedian Harry Shearer, one of only a handful of people known to have seen the film, said he was "stunned" by how bad it was.

In 1992, he said: "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."

The film's release was initially blocked by co-writer Joan O'Brien, according to the Lewis biography King of Comedy by Shawn Levy.

Later, Lewis himself didn't want the film to be shown, at least not in his lifetime, and rarely spoke about it.

On one of the few occasions he broke his silence, he said it was "bad, bad, bad" and would "never be seen".

"I was ashamed of the work and I was grateful I had the power to contain it all and never let anyone see it," he said in 2013.

Last year, images from the film featured in a BBC documentary titled The Story of The Day the Clown Cried, and clips have emerged on YouTube.

Various purported versions of the script have been circulated online, inspiring both live readings and video re-enactments.

Lewis was famous around the world for his partnership with Dean Martin, his fund-raising for muscular dystrophy and his numerous hit comedies.

For all his attempts to keep it under wraps, though, his infamous Holocaust drama remains a source of continued fascination and debate...

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THE DAY THE CLOWN CRIED UNEARTHED

One of the most notorious, unreleased films ever made, Jerry Lewis' Holocaust drama "The Day The Clown Cried" has long been the subject of rumor and speculation. Even Lewis himself, who has long been sitting on the only copy of the movie, has veered in recent interviews from being "embarrassed" to "proud" of the effort in which he plays a German circus clown arrested by the Gestapo after mocking Hitler, and who is eventually forced by the Nazis to perform and help lead Jewish children to concentration camp gas chambers. But he has long held he would never show the movie (which was plagued by production and financial woes) publicly, though he thinks if he had a chance to tweak it, maybe it could work.

"I think about this a lot. If I could pull certain specific elements from the project, and give me these three or four elements that I can do what I want with, if I hired Lincoln Center one night, for a specific audience, and give me one week shooting to let me shoot a beginning to that, a beginning to that, and a beginning to that and let me show that…. Whoooo-weeeee! It would be fucking wonderful to think about," he said in 2013, adding: "What I would shoot would be strictly as a marketing presentation tool for that night and it would all be thrown away after that night."

Well, that's not happening, but Lewis is making the picture available for future generations. The LA Times reveals that the Library Of Congress has just received a collection of Lewis' work from the man himself, including "The Day The Clown Cried." But there's one caveat: Lewis made the Library agree not to screen the movie for ten years.

So, the wait will continue, but it looks like this little piece of movie history will finally come to light in a decade...

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THE DAY THE CLOWN CRIED RESURFACES

Jerry Lewis’ 1972 The Day the Clown Cried is one of the most famous unreleased films of all time — a movie so bad that Lewis has sworn it will never see the light of day. Until now, all we've seen is a few still images and the original screenplay, but that all changed when a YouTube user named unclesporkums uploaded seven minutes of footage from the set of the forgotten film, which was then posted by Entertainment Weekly. Reddit user mvuijlst points out that the original footage is from a 1972 broadcast of Flemish TV program Première-magazine.

So why is Lewis so determined to keep the movie under wraps? The plot revolves around a clown at a Nazi concentration camp who ends up befriending the children imprisoned there. The film ends as Lewis’ character, overcome with grief at having led the children into a gas chamber, chooses to stay with the children as they are all killed. One of the few people to actually see it, actor and comedian Harry Shearer, said "the closest I can come to describing the effect is if you flew down to Tijuana and suddenly saw a painting on black velvet of Auschwitz."

The Day the Clown Cried (and its cringe-inducing ending) reportedly tested so poorly with early audiences that Lewis vowed to keep it locked up forever. But while the video above offers a glimmer of hope for film historians and others hoping for the relic to finally be released to the public, Lewis doesn't sound like he's letting it go anytime soon. In a Reuters interview from May, the original Nutty Professor star said "you will never see it, no one will ever see it, because I am embarrassed at the poor work."

You can see this new 7 minute video here.

JERRY LEWIS AND THE DAY THE CLOWN CRIED

Every comedian wants to do drama. In classic Hollywood, funny men like Jackie Gleason, Bob Hope, and even George Burns were trying to be the next Spencer Tracy, and legendary comedian Jerry Lewis was no different. When Lewis went solo in the late 50s, he had big success writing, directing and acting in a number of classic comedies, peaking in 1963 with the original Nutty Professor.

As hilarious and groundbreaking as Lewis has been at his best, he's also been equally unfunny, schmaltzy, heavy-handed and tasteless at his worst, and it's hard to think of a better example of this than The Day The Clown Cried.

In the annals of bad movies, there is one film that still stands as the crown jewel of the realm. More than three decades after it was made, the urban legend of Jerry Lewis' The Day The Clown Cried still continues to grow, which is pretty amazing considering very few people have actually seen it (hence it turning up in our list of high profile films that never had a proper release recently).

The storyline alone is enough to make your jaw drop. Lewis plays Helmut Doork, a German gentile clown who's hauled off to the concentration camps for making fun of Hitler, and he's forced to entertain the children he's imprisoned with before they're marched off to the gas chambers.

Clown, which went into production in early 1972, was going to be Lewis' first serious role, and the film that would prove his mettle as an auteur to the critics. But the film has never been released because the rights to the screenplay expired, but Lewis went ahead with the production, and when he showed the finished film to its screenwriter, Joan O'Brien, she was appalled with the end result and refused to renew the rights again.

Throughout the years, Clown has been the butt of many jokes. In 1980, it was nominated for a Golden Turkey Award, which was the original Razzies that celebrated the worst movies in history (Ed Wood became a household name when he got the bird in their Worst Director category). Clown was nominated for The Worst Movie You Never Saw, and adding insult to injury, it couldn't even win that award (the prize went to Billy Jack Goes To Washington, which after many years finally got a DVD release).

In 1992, it got a big write-up in Spy Magazine, and Harry Shearer, one of the chosen few who've actually seen the film, said, "The closest I can come to describing the effect is if you flew down to Tijuana and suddenly saw a painting on black velvet of Auschwitz." (Actually, this would make a great pull quote for the DVD cover).

Shawn Levy, who wrote King Of Comedy, the essential Jerry Lewis biography, certainly understands why there's still fascination with this film. "Jerry Lewis is still such a strange and singular bird that I think the very concept is intriguing," he says. "And the people who've seen the film and spoken about it - Harry Shearer, say - are so vivid in their description that they've made it a holy grail. I think the interest in it is the inconceivable oddness of it."

As for how many people have actually seen the film to date, it's difficult to say. According to one guesstimate, it's as low as eleven, but Levy says, "There's apparently a mostly-complete copy in the vaults of the studio where it was shot (they held on to it for legal reasons, as they were never paid entirely for use of their facilities). So it could be ten or twenty or two hundred folks. But Jerry is said to have the only complete version, so access would have been very limited."

Personally I think that my goal in life before I leave this world is to see The Day The Clown Cried before I die. I have a copy of the script, and it is amazing. With Jerry Lewis now aging and in poor health I think seeing this movie monster is a possibility in my lifetime. However, there is more than Jerry Lewis holding the movie back. The legal and financial issues have got to be a major hurdle to overcome. Still one day though I hope we see this movie, which is by far one of the most famous movies people have never seen...