The documentary that Jerry Lewis' never published Nazi Camp Clown Movie ‹Crimereads

To date, the idea is that it is limp: Jerry Lewis leads and plays in a film about a former circus clown that maintains children in the Nazi death camps – and even leads them to the gas chamber.

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It was an equally bizarre idea, perhaps all the more when the Holocaust in the collective spirit of the nation was fresh and Lewis was a Mawkian but loved comedian and director. At that time it was perhaps best known for its annual laboratory Day Muscular Dystrophy Telethons, but Legors' lessons. While filming.

In the documentary “From Darkness to Light” in 2024 about Lewis 'unhappy attempt to make his Holocaust film “The Day on which the clown was cried”, Lewis' search for “clown” examines the idea that it is an exercise in filmmaking.

There is no major critic of Lewis in the documentary as Lewis himself, who calls his film “Bad Work” and realizes that I simply did not achieve in interviews that were carried out for the documentary before his death in 2017. At that point, Lewis was either gone or hidden; But you have the feeling that when he criticized his own work, he had hoped to contradict him.

In any case, “from dark to light”, staged by Michael Lurie and Eric Friedler, is a fascinating look at an artistic effort and one of the most bizarre films that are never completed and published in the cinemas.

From telethon to the horror of the Second World War

Jerry Lewis was an important cultural figure in my life and the life of my friends in the 1960s and 1970s.

The first film I saw in a cinema was, I'm pretty sure that Lewis' “Who is doing the shop?” Published at the end of 1963, but played in my hometown in January 1964. The fact that after the film I handed over to the sidewalk in front of the theater was not an early film criticism, but can probably be held responsible for lunch.

My friends and I looked at his laboratory Day Weekend Telethon every year, which was enthusiastic about the kitsch and the atmosphere, which ranged from Manic to Maudlin. In the 1970s, a group of us appeared that had collected money for the Muscular Dystrophy Association by our Star Trek Club-we were good middle geeks, friends in an Indianapolis segment of telethon.

As a teenager or early teen film fanatic in the early 1970s, we were amazed at the idea that Lewis made a film about the Holocaust. The Second World War and Hitler's “final solution” were known to us; Our fathers had served in the army during the war. The idea that Lewis – undeniably a comedic genius and accomplished director for comedies with some serious aspects – would make such a film when we read about it in newspapers and amazed us. What a bizarre thought.

(That we mean our pop culture objects seriously. A few years later we were next to ourselves when Gerald Ford's forgiveness of Richard Nixon had paid a TV film version of “Dracula” with Jack Palance.)

These days before the Internet, the sum of what we knew about most of the pop culture with genre-oriented magazines such as “Famous Monsters of Filmland” newspapers, television news and nightly ritual considerations of “The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson”. How else did children from a small town in Indiana know so much about jazz legends like Buddy Rich and Catskills Comedians?

While we designed ourselves for news about this extraordinary and extraordinarily poorly, as we believed to be true, we didn't hear much about it.

The documentary “From Darkness to Light” even contains TV film material from Lewis with Carson about “The day on which the clown cried”. There is no other context about the guest place than indicating that Lewis knew that the film was in trouble at that time. Nevertheless, he jokes when Carson asks him about the film that comes out in the spring (in the year in which the interview was probably in 1973). “Spring?” Lewis cracks. “I'm better off on the last roles.”

“From Darkness to Light” shows how bad the film was: it was a passion for Lewis and he was an experienced director-ner of comedies. For “the day the clown cried”, Lewis had to overcome more than an incredibly unlikely premise. He also had to deal with a producer who might have been dishonest with him and fell off the financing that flows off production after weeks of shooting in Sweden and France.

Scorsese: “We thought it was a myth”

To see “From Darkness to Light” it should be seen that Lewis was viewed in the entire film world as a filmmaker in France and, in fact, perhaps retrospectively. The film material from Lewis is interviewed by French reporters via “Clown”. The documentary film interview director Martin Scorsese, who has made films since 1967, whose career was supposed to go up with “Mean Streets” in 1973, about the time when people wondered whether “the day the clown was crying” would ever see a projection room.

In fact, Scorsese was that Lewis was a talented director, but the idea that he “would cry the day on which the clown” was very unlikely. “We thought it was a myth,” Scorsese told the documenters. You and I both, Marty.

Another experienced film director, Mel Brooks, who wanted to achieve a career sheet with “Young Frankenstein” and “Blazing Saddles” in 1974 and who was known to parody Hitler and Nazis in “The Producers” in 1967, says that projects are not much more wrong than “the day on which the clown is the clown”. Brooks points out that Hitler and Nazis were themselves ripe for parody during the war – and they had declined to Donald Duck and Charlie Chaplin – but there was no way to find humor in the Holocaust.

And it is difficult to say, even from the extensive film material of “The day on which the clown in the documentary”, as humorous Lewis was intended at all.

Redemption and funny stuff

Lewis does not tell the documentary films exactly when he intends to make a serious film with unsettled aspects, but the essential film material from “Clown” contained in the documentary is likely.

There are parts of Lewis that appear as a sad clown, especially in a French circus that indicate that he is planning to use his trademark “funny stuff”. Remarkable from a Nazi camp scene is a moment when, while he maintains Jewish children on the other side of the fence, he gets a nostril on barbwire. Many of these humorous moments are Lewis, good as a clown and take a pratfall. This makes it all the more worried when he takes a fall after being hit the floor by a Nazi bearing guard. The worrying needle immediately goes into the red when a fellow prisoner is tried to help and shot.

Such serious scenes were shot and two things are obvious: Lewis is quite good with his straight acting and he obviously intended that “clown” vary between dramatic and humorous.

There is certainly a sharpness – be it intended by Lewis or not – in the idea that Helmut, Lewis' character, is sent to the camp in order to mock Hitler, but redeem himself, get out of the concentration camp and return to his role as a prominent clown. Lewis was smart and was almost certain that Helmut was a deputy for himself in any way.

As he says in the documentary – even when he praised the work of his European occupation and crew, which made the film in 1972 – he did not achieve what he wanted with the film. But it is difficult to imagine what he wanted to achieve or how he could have achieved it.

The documentary refers to “Life is beautiful”, the 1997 Oscar winner with Robert Benigni as an Italian man who tries to protect his son from the horrors of a concentration camp. Several people who were questioned in the documentary of “Leben is beautiful” as an indication that Lewis was ahead of his time. The only comment from Lewis, unless I missed something else, was at prices at Benigni.

“From Darkness to Light” contains extracts from interviews with an interesting selection of Hollywood people, from Scorsese to Gilbert Gottfried to Rob Reiner to Brooks. There are great comments by the actor and comedian Harry Shear “This is Spinal Tap”, legendary one of the few people who have recorded in the “Clown” recording.

And not only appeals why the film has never been released-in a lack of money to end it, and a lack of willingness for Lewis' part, his failure again-even time for the secret behind the film, which happened with the actual physical prints and how they have accepted a granic-like status. In 2015, Lewis himself donated rough film material to the Congress library on the condition that it was only published in 2024.

One of the best ongoing subordinate actions in “From Darkness to Light” is how other prints of the film are preserved, including one that was allegedly held by a Swedish film processing and production company until Lewis or the producer were paid to publish them. In the 1980s, the company allegedly planned to reject the film material. A worker in the laboratory recognized the film for what he was and made sure that video duplicates were made by “clown”. At the same time, the laboratory made video popias of porn films for the publication by the burgeoning VHS market, but the production of dupes from “the day on which the clown cried” was made, the courageous activity in this laboratory was reserved for late at night when porn as a cover for activity had expired.

I wish “from dark to light” Lewi's comments on this intrigue.