Movies - The Day the Clown Cried

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	Movies - The Day the Clown Cried

The Day the Clown Cried is an unfinished film directed by and starring Jerry Lewis. It is based on a book by the same name by Joan O'Brien who had co-written the original script ten years earlier. Lewis plays a German clown who is arrested by the Gestapo for mocking the Führer, and imprisoned in a Nazi prison camp for political prisoners. He ends up accidentally accompanying Jewish children to Auschwitz, and is eventually used, in almost Pied Piper fashion, to help lead Jewish children to their deaths.

Principal photography began on the film in 1972, but the producer not only ran out of money before completing the film, his option to produce the film had expired before filming began. Lewis paid to finish shooting the film, but the parties involved in its production were never able to come to terms which would allow the film to be released.

A May 1992 article in Spy magazine quotes 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.

The article quoted O'Brien as saying the rough cut she saw was a "disaster"; it also says she and the original script's other writer, Charles Denton, will never allow the film to be released, in part due to changes in the script made by Lewis which made the clown more sympathetic and Emmett Kelly-like.

Trivia

Spy also reported Milton Berle
, Dick Van Dyke
, and Bobby Darin
were among those who had considered playing the clown during the years before Lewis got involved.
Years later Life Is Beautiful
gracefully tells a story about a man shielding his son as best he can from the horrors of a Nazi concentration camp.

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