Has Jerry Lewis’s ‘Lost’ Holocaust Clown Film Been Found?

More than five decades ago, comedian Jerry Lewis directed and starred in The Day the Clown Cried, a film about a German clown who is promised freedom if he leads Jewish children to their deaths at a concentration camp during the Holocaust. There was plenty of public skepticism about both the project’s premise and how it would be executed — Lewis hadn’t yet shown off his dramatic acting abilities in Martin Scorsese’s The King of Comedy; at the time, he was mostly known for comedic roles in movies such as The Nutty Professor. Ultimately, The Day the Clown Cried was never released. “It’s either better than Citizen Kane, or the worst piece of shit anyone ever loaded on the projector,” Lewis told Entertainment Weekly in 2009, noting that the only copy of the 1972 film was locked up in a safe. But curiosity about its contents has persisted. “For a certain kind of movie buff,” the New York Times wrote in 2018, “it is one of the last White Whales of lost cinema.”

On May 28, the Swedish magazine Icon and Swedish state broadcaster SVT broke the news that Swedish actor Hans Crispin has long possessed a stolen version of the film, which he screened for a couple journalists as proof. What is he going to do with it, and why do people care so much? Here’s everything to know about this movie, including why the U.S. Library of Congress didn’t do public screenings of it after Lewis donated his personal collection.

How did Hans Crispin get his hands on the film?

Well, what he has is technically more like the Hans Crispin cut of the film. Crispin found and stole a workprint of the film from its Swedish production studio, Europafilm, while he was working there in 1980, he told Icon. (Europafilm tasked some of its employees with copying pornographic films to VHS format during night shifts, and he recruited someone to help him do the same thing, just for the boxes of material he’d found of The Day the Clown Cried.) The footage had been edited by film editor Wic Kjellin, but Crispin cut it into a full film — although part of the beginning was missing — by following annotated original scripts he’d also discovered at Europafilm. According to Crispin, he then locked the film away and didn’t think about it until someone who apparently knew about his theft mailed him a VCR cassette in 1990 with the eight opening minutes that had been shot in Paris.

Crispin has occasionally screened his copy for guests in his apartment in Sweden; he told Icon reporter Caroline Hainer that she would be the 20th or 21st person in the world to see the film in full. He said he has not been more public about his possession of the film because he was scared for a long time that the police would come for him. Now, he’s coming forward because what he did will be public soon anyway — he participated in From Darkness to Light, a documentary about the making of The Day the Clown Cried that premiered at the 2024 Venice Film Festival and is reportedly set to release in Sweden this summer. (Crispin also confessed his crime in a phone call with his old boss, who he said did not threaten to report him to the authorities and instead actually thanked him for saving the film.)

What does Crispin want to do with his copy?

It sounds like he’s done gatekeeping. “It must be seen,” he said. “I think I want to hand it over to the next generation. With today’s technique, it can be restored. I want to sell it to a serious producer who either restores it or keeps it locked away, or restores it and shows it to people for studying purposes.”

Why wasn’t The Day the Clown Cried released in the first place?

Lewis apparently didn’t have permission to make the movie. According to Shawn Levy’s 1996 biography of the comedian, publicist Joan O’Brien came up with the idea for the story in the early 1960s, then co-wrote a script with critic Charles Denton. Lewis rewrote that script, but didn’t find out until the movie was already shooting that his producer had never actually secured the legal rights to the story. In his 2005 memoir, Lewis claimed that the producer in question also “skipped” town without paying for other expenses, leaving Lewis to burn through $2 million of his own money on the project. In any case, the original writers were against the release of the film due to changes the comedian made to the script; they told Spy magazine in 1992 that Lewis had changed the originally selfish clown into a more sympathetic character. Patton Oswalt, who obtained a copy of Lewis’s script and staged readings of it with fellow comedians such as Bob Odenkirk in the late ‘90s, also saw differences. “The script was originally written by Joan O’Brien and Charles Denton. But when Jerry Lewis decided to make it, he made … revisions,” Oswalt wrote in his 2015 memoir. “Slapstick. Pratfalls. A scene where it’s so cold in the concentration camp barracks that the clown — named Helmut Doork — pisses ice.”

What did Lewis think about the film?

His opinion seemingly changed over time. In a 1982 autobiography, he wrote that The Day the Clown Cried “must be seen.” Lewis, the son of Russian Jewish immigrants, then told EW in 2009 that Jewish audiences “would love it.” In the same interview, he addressed the fascination surrounding the film. “I think it’s like bad advertising,” he said. “For it to become what it has become seems unfair. Unfair to the project. Unfair to all of my good intentions. Unfair to anyone that you will sit down and have them see what you’re proclaiming is a finished work. It ain’t finished.” Four years later, per Reuters, Lewis offered another evaluation of the film at Cannes: “It was all bad and it was bad because I lost the magic. You will never see it, no one will ever see it, because I am embarrassed at the poor work.” Lewis, who died in 2017, donated his personal collection (including footage of The Day the Clown Cried) to the U.S. Library of Congress in 2014, with the stipulation that it could not be screened for a decade.

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Who else has seen The Day the Clown Cried, and what did they think?

Again, it depends on what you consider counts as the film. Lewis said that he, his dad, and his manager had seen the film as of his 2009 EW interview, in which he maintained that there had never been any actual screenings of The Day the Clown Cried. (He himself only watched it in Sweden, coming home with only pieces of “specific reels.”) But over the past few decades, several people have said that they watched a version of the film. The reactions have been varied. “This movie is so drastically wrong,” comedian Harry Shearer, who recalled in a 1992 Spy magazine piece that he had seen a cut of the film in 1979, “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.” He likened the film to how it would feel “if you flew down to Tijuana and suddenly saw a black velvet painting of Auschwitz.”

French film critic Jean-Michel Frodon offered a comparatively glowing review. He told Vanity Fair that he enjoyed the film when French director Xavier Giannoli had shown him a copy of the film around 2004 or 2005. “It’s a very interesting and important film, very daring about both the issue, which of course is the Holocaust, but even beyond that as a story of a man who has dedicated his life to making people laugh and is questioning what it is to make people laugh,” Frodon said. “I think it is a very bitter film, and a disturbing film, and this is why it was so brutally dismissed by those people who saw it, or elements of it, including the writers of the script.”

In 2016, the internet got a little taste when 32 minutes of cut-together footage from The Day the Clown Cried, including behind-the-scenes takes, leaked online. In 2024, the U.S. Library of Congress invited Benjamin Charles Germain Lee, a scholar studying the Holocaust whose grandfather allowed Auschwitz, to become the first member of the public to watch the footage that it had gotten from Lewis in a 2014 donation, under the condition that it could not be screened for a decade. “Among the range of emotions I experienced, offense was not one of them—something I cannot say for most of Hollywood’s Holocaust films,” Lee wrote in an essay for The New Republic about his viewing experience. He asserted that the footage invites viewers to explore the “precarious balance” between tragedy and humor and “the conventional limits and purposes of humor as well—not just when it comes to atrocity, but also in the viewer’s life.” Meanwhile, Icon’s Caroline Hainer, whom Crispin invited to see his copy of the film, reflected that the film might not be “the worst in the world” as speculated, but found it “very boring” and critiqued the Swedish cast’s acting.

Why didn’t the U.S. Library of Congress release the film?

The main reason that the library can’t screen the full film for the public? It doesn’t actually have the full film. The library’s moving-image curator, Rob Stone, clarified in an email to the New York Times in 2018 that Lewis only donated partial negatives: almost 90 minutes of unedited camera rushes without sound, plus some behind-the-scenes footage. Stone also said at the time that he intended to consult lawyers before making a decision on whether the material could be viewed, noting that someone who claimed to be a rights holder had reached out over potential copyright concerns. 2024 marked the end of the 10-year period that Lewis had established needed to pass before his collection could be published. Ultimately, that summer, the Library of Congress announced that the materials it has of The Day the Clown Cried would be made available for research purposes only.

What about the remake? Does that have anything to do with this?

Possibly. Former Republican lobbyist and convicted felon Jack Abramoff confirmed to Mother Jones that he’d tried to back a movie adaptation of The Day the Clown Cried in the early ‘90s, but it failed because “the rights weren’t clear” and “nobody could get clearance.” But in August 2024, K. Jam Media founder Kia Jam reportedly succeeded, telling Deadline that he had executed a purchase agreement on O’Brien and Denton’s original script. Jam, who affirmed in the piece that he has “nothing but respect for Jerry,” pointed out that Lewis “never really had the rights” to the script he rewrote.

And it seemed like Jam had been keeping tabs on who else could potentially try to release footage from Lewis’s film. Jam told Deadline that he reached out to the Library of Congress after hearing that they had a copy that they could screen in 2024. “I basically said, respectfully, if you do have a copy of the film, you don’t have the rights to screen it,” Jam recalled. (He didn’t mind once he was informed that they only had “elements” of the film like set stills that researchers could come look at.) He had also reached out to the team behind From Darkness to Light, the Venice Film Festival documentary that Crispin participated in, “just to see what it is they’re trying to do,” though he did not immediately hear back. “I’m not here to stop anyone from doing anything else,” Jam said. “What I’m here to do is to make the original script.” Although it took Jam three or four years “and a small fortune in legal fees” to “clean up the rights,” he told Deadline that he thinks his efforts will be worth it. “It will be a really powerful film,” he said. “It’s ultimately a redemption story. And I think with everything that’s going on in the world today, now more than ever is the time to make a movie like this.”