Jerry Lewis’ Lost Movie: Can You Watch ‘The Day the Clown Cried’?

After decades shrouded in mystery, a complete workprint of Jerry Lewis’s unreleased 1972 film, The Day the Clown Cried, has been discovered in Sweden, according to reports from Swedish news broadcaster SVT and the magazine Icon. The film, a controversial drama about a German circus clown imprisoned in a Nazi concentration camp, was long believed to be lost or incomplete, with Lewis himself repeatedly blocking its release.

Hans Crispin, a Swedish actor known for his role in the 1980s television series Angne & Svullo, claims he illicitly obtained the film from the archives of Europafilm in 1980, making a VHS copy in a clandestine operation. He later completed the print in 1990 when a former colleague anonymously mailed him the opening six minutes, originally filmed in Paris. Crispin has reportedly been privately screening the film for small groups for over four decades.

The revelation comes after the Library of Congress, which received an incomplete copy of the film from Lewis in 2015 with a stipulation against public access until June 2024, screened five hours of footage for journalist Benjamin Charles Germain Lee in August 2024. Lee subsequently reported that the Library’s collection did not contain a finished film, confirming the fragmented nature of the existing material.

The Day the Clown Cried stars Lewis as Helmut, a clown who, after mocking Adolf Hitler, is imprisoned in Auschwitz and forced to entertain children on their way to the gas chambers. The project was plagued by difficulties during production, including a lack of filming permits in Paris, which forced a relocation to Sweden, and challenges in finding actors who could convincingly portray German speakers, as detailed in a recent documentary exploring the film’s troubled history. According to reporting from The Forward, Lewis undertook extensive research, visiting concentration camps in an attempt to create a genuinely moving portrayal of the Holocaust.

Despite Lewis’s intentions, the film became a source of personal anguish for the comedian, who disowned the project and actively discouraged any attempts to view it. The film’s premise has been widely criticized as exploitative and insensitive.

Crispin has indicated his willingness to make the workprint available to a “serious producer” who would either restore it or preserve it for scholarly purposes. He has stated his intention to “hand it over to the next generation,” believing the film “must be seen.” The future of the film, and whether it will finally be released to the public, remains uncertain.