‘The Day the Clown Cried’: The 1970s movie cancelled for being too controversial
Comedians seeking to reinvent themselves and add more strings to their performative bows by tackling a meaty dramatic performance has been standard practice in the movie business for decades, but when Jerry Lewis attempted it with The Day the Clown Cried, the results proved so controversial on and off-screen that the film was pulled from release and buried.
A multi-talented actor, writer, director, and producer, Lewis enjoyed a career that spanned eight decades and earned him the nickname of ‘The King of Comedy’. One of the biggest stars of his era, he was one of the most influential figures in American pop culture from the 1940s to the 1960s, inspiring generations of would-be comics to follow in his footsteps.
His star didn’t shine quite so bright at the beginning of the 1970s, though, which partially inspired him to make what would turn out to be the most infamous mistake of his career. Playing the title role – with the character called Helmut Doork – the co-production between France and Sweden featured Lewis as a washed-up clown who ends up using his familiar routines to try and raise spirits among prisoners of a concentration camp.
The leading man lost 35 pounds ahead of filming after rewriting the screenplay significantly to suit his sensibilities, only for the star and director to wade headlong into misfortune from day one. As his son Chris told The New York Times, Lewis took creative liberties under the impression “he had full artistic licence” until he discovered that wasn’t covered by the terms of his contract.
Midway through production, it transpired that screenwriter Joan O’Brien hadn’t been paid the $50,000 she was due before cameras started rolling, and with producer Nat Wachsberger having essentially vanished off the face of the planet, Lewis was forced to funnel millions of dollars of his own money into The Day the Clown Cried.
When O’Brien saw an early cut in an attempt for the creative team to reacquire the rights to her work that hadn’t been officially obtained, she deemed it unfit for release and refused to sign anything, calling Lewis’ version unauthorised as per the original agreement. Scheduled to be released in 1973, The Day the Clown Cried has still never been seen in anything close to its entirety by anyone other than a select few close to the production.
As whispers began to make the rounds of Lewis’ doomed attempt to turn the Holocaust into the basis for a heart-warming redemption story of a clown getting his mojo back, so did the mockery. Several industry figures claimed to have seen the rough cut, and all of them agreed that it was a misstep of monumental proportions, one that was much better off never being allowed to see the light of day.
Still, the mythology surrounding The Day the Clown Cried only continued to grow, with Lewis admitting to Entertainment Weekly that the perception had been reduced to his passion project being either “better than Citizen Kane or the worst piece of shit that anyone ever loaded on the projector”, with no in between.
Lewis told the world in 2013 that “no one will ever see it because I am embarrassed by the work”, but that may not be strictly true. The Library of Congress has partial negatives comprising almost 90 minutes of footage from The Day the Clown Cried, which means it could yet see the light of day in some form eventually.
