Infamous Unreleased Jerry Lewis Holocaust Comedy Could Finally See The Light Of Day

It is a movie of myth and legend in Hollywood, never released, and until now never likely to be.

Jerry Lewis’s ‘The Day The Clown Cried’ was made by the revered comedian in the 70s, but never properly finished because it was reputedly so terribly awful.

The film has now been donated among a collection of Lewis’s other work to the Library of Congress in the US, but with the proviso that it will not be screened for at least another decade.

It would have taken a deft hand behind the camera to turn the premise into something suitable for release.

In it, Lewis played Helmut Doork, a German clown who is arrested by the Gestapo for mocking Hitler during World War Two.

After being sent to a prison camp, he is then used by the guards to help lead Jewish children to their deaths in the gas chambers.

It was sobering – not to say horrifying – source material, but Lewis was said to have mishandled it with catastrophic results.

Famously, Harry Shearer of 'The Simpsons’ and 'This Is Spinal Tap’, saw it in 1979 and wrote about it years later for Spy magazine.

“With most of these kinds of things, you find that the anticipation, or the concept, is better than the thing itself,” he wrote.

“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.”

Lewis himself, now 89, has said of the project: “I lost the magic. You will never see it. No one will ever see it, because I am embarrassed at the poor work.”

He reiterated his view in a Q&A in 2013, saying: “In terms of that film I was embarrassed. I was ashamed of the work, and I was grateful that I had the power to contain it all, and never let anyone see it. It was bad, bad, bad…But I can tell you how it ends.”

We may get to see for ourselves… just perhaps not for another decade or so.

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Image credits: Yahoo File