The Jerry Lewis Holocaust movie no one has ever seen

Jerry Lewis, the legendary American comedian, once made a film so controversial it was never seen by the public.

"The Day the Clown Cried," shot in 1972, tells the story of a circus clown who leads children to their deaths in a Nazi concentration camp.

The film's plot alone is enough to raise eyebrows, but its troubled production history and subsequent disappearance — the film has never been released to the public and legal issues ensure it likely never will be — have elevated it to near-mythical status among film buffs.

"If you just tell people: Jerry Lewis wrote, directed and starred in a drama about a clown in a concentration camp leading children into the gas chambers, people say: 'What? How have I never heard of this movie, how have I never seen it?'" said Shawn Levy, author of "King of Comedy: The Life and Art of Jerry Lewis."

A new documentary, "From Darkness to Light," explores the making of "The Day the Clown Cried" and Lewis' complicated relationship with it. The documentary will screen at this year's Venice Film Festival. While it won't show the full film, it promises never-before-seen footage of the movie, providing a glimpse into this enduring Hollywood mystery.

'Nutty Professor' tries to get serious

Lewis, who died in 2017 at the age of 91, was a showbiz legend who was best known for slapstick comedies like "Cinderfella" and "The Nutty Professor." 

In the early 1970s, with his career on the skids, he made a bid to be taken more seriously. 

He was offered the starring role in "The Day the Clown Cried," based on a script by publicist-turned-TV producer, Joan O'Brien, and Charles Denton, then a TV critic with the Los Angeles Examiner.

The story follows a German circus performer in the 1940s who gets sent to a concentration camp for drunkenly mocking Hitler onstage.

Once there, he is tasked with entertaining Jewish children to distract them as they are being led to the gas chambers. In the movie's final act, the clown chooses to join the children inside the gas chamber and die with them. It's a comedy. Supposedly. 

Something in the story apparently appealed to Lewis, who was Jewish, since he threw himself into the work.

He toured the Dachau and Auschwitz concentration camps for research and went on a grapefruit diet to shed 35 pounds (16 kilograms) to look more gaunt for the role. 

He also rewrote the script to make it better fit his slapstick style, adding jokes and pratfalls and changing the protagonist's name from the more generic Karl Schmidt to ... Helmut Doork. Get it?

Production problems and legal hassles

The production of "The Day the Clown Cried" was plagued from the start by legal issues.

Nathan Wachsberger, the producer who had hired Lewis, did not have the rights to make the movie. He only had an option to adapt the O'Brien/Denton script — an option that had expired by the time Lewis arrived in Europe to start shooting. 

Lewis went ahead anyway, investing, by his own account, $2 million (€1.8 million) of his own money to finish the film. 

He shot the movie in Paris and Sweden, but money was tight. When the production wrapped, the Swedish studio, claiming it was owed $600,000, held back some of the footage and the original negatives.

Undeterred, Lewis headed back to the US with his first rough cut of the film. He screened it for O'Brien, who, as the original author, had final say in whether the movie could be released. It did not go well. 

"She left the screening room in tears," said Levy, "saying, 'This will never see the light of day, I will never give you the rights.' When she passed, she put it in her will: This film can never be shown."

"From Darkness to Light," which screens in the Venice Film Festival's Venice Classics section, will explore the making of the film and Lewis' complicated, decadeslong relation to it. 

Co-directed by American director Michael Lurie and German documentarian Eric Friedler, the movie features several minutes of original material from Lewis' film, as well as one of the last interviews Lewis gave about the movie before he died.

Lost masterpiece or complete disaster?

Only a handful of people claim to have seen Lewis' rough cut of "The Day the Clown Cried," and reactions have been mixed.

The French film critic Jean-Michel Frodon said he saw a cut in the early 2000s and he admired it.

American comedian Harry Shearer, who voices several characters on "The Simpsons" including Mr. Burns and Ned Flanders, said he was able to watch the film on a "three-quarter-inch tape" in 1979. In an interview with Spy magazine, Shearer described the experience as watching "a painting on black velvet of Auschwitz."

Lewis himself gave mixed signals about the film throughout his life. "This picture must be seen," he wrote in his 1982 autobiography. In 2013, at a question-and-answer session at the Cannes Film Festival, he told an audience that "no one will ever see it, because I am embarrassed at the poor work ... It was bad, bad, bad. I slipped up."

"I've seen a lot of the original footage, and there were a lot of scenes I thought were great, and there were scenes that were bad, badly shot, where [Lewis] was bad, others where he was really good," said Friedler, speaking in 2016 after the premiere of "Der Clown," an earlier documentary on the making of "The Day the Clown Cried."

"I think he got lost [...] maybe if he had more time he could have found a way to make a tragedy, or tragic-comedy, from the material," said Friedler. 

He suggested that "The Day the Clown Cried" could have made the Holocaust comedy work nearly 30 years before Roberto Benigni's Oscar-winning 1997 film "Life is Beautiful". But Friedler concluded that Lewis "never got the chance."

Why the public still can't see 'The Day the Clown Cried'

In 2015, two years before he died, Lewis donated his personal archive, including materials from "The Day the Clown Cried," to the Library of Congress in the US.

However, the donation came with a stipulation that the footage could not be shown for at least 10 years.

Fans expecting a release next year will be disappointed. The library has confirmed they have only partial negatives of the movie, around 90 minutes of unedited camera rushes without sound, as well as some behind-the-scenes footage. Even then, legal restrictions mean the movie cannot be commercially released.

"Even if you could find the remaining footage and somehow reassemble it, using AI to do the voices, whatever, you still don't have the rights to charge a penny to see this material because O'Brien's estate stipulates that it will not happen," said Levy. "It's a historical document, but will never be a commercial film."

There have been several attempts to remake the original O'Brien and Denton script. A new version is supposedly in the works, with plans to shoot in Europe. But Levy suggested that the mystery surrounding the "lost Jerry Lewis Holocaust comedy" may be more valuable than the film itself.

"Even if the film had succeeded, even if it was 'Schindler's List,' even if it was a masterpiece, it would have shrunk over time," said Levy. "The fact that we can never see it means it has never shrunk, and it never will."

Edited by: Stuart Braun and Cristina Burack