Jerry Lewis' 'The Day The Clown Cried' Added To The Library Of Congress, But...

[PoliticAverse]

With A 10 Year Screening Embargo

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."

Read the rest at: http://blogs.indiewire.com/theplaylist/jerry-lewis-the-day-the-clown-cried-added-to-the-library-of-congress-but-with-a-10-year-screening-embargo-20150806

[ProudToBeBlueInRhody]

1. Harry Shearer's quote upon seeing it still strikes me

Although never seen publicly, the film became a source of legend almost immediately after its production. In May 1992, an article in Spy magazine quotes comedian and actor Harry Shearer, who saw a rough cut of the film in 1979:

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.
—Harry Shearer, Spy Magazine, 1992[5]

And:

Shearer likened it to “a painting on black velvet of Auschwitz.”

[PoliticAverse]

2. A documentary made about the making of the film...