From Darkness to Light

A current documentary on the infamously abandoned Jerry Lewis holocaust vehicle The Day the Clown Cried. Back in the early 70's Lewis set out to make a film about a circus clown who ends up in a concentration group who manages to keep the spirits of the children up while imprisoned there until the wheels of cruelty move them towards their ultimate fate. Lewis felt he had a winner on his hands as evidenced by the various talk shows he went on at the time where he was hyping the near completion of it but then through budget cuts from an unreliable producer & the dawning realization the material was not shaping up to his standards put the film's release into limbo for many years which even by the time of his death & asked about it, he'd say the project was dead. Through interviews w/some of the survivors of the project w/Lewis himself interviewed in length before his passing, we get an idea of what went wrong (especially those who have seen an assembly of the film like Harry Shearer). A fascinating watch since I'd heard about this film within the last few years w/this doc providing actual scenes cobbled together so an audience could make heads or tails of what could've been. Considering subsequent films like the Oscar winning Life is Beautiful & I think Robin Williams made one entitled Jakob the Liar, one wonders if Lewis' take on similar material might've beaten the others to the gate for acclaim & recognition. We'll never know.

"From Darkness to Light" shows us as much of Jerry Lewis' "The Day the Clown Cried" as we are likely to ever see. I'm sure Jerry's movie would be a hard one to sit through but I would like to give it a try. The scenes that directors Eric Friedler and Michael Lurie show are interesting but they also give the impression that "The Day the Clown Cried" would be a pretty hard movie to get through. But then again, maybe not. I didn't grow up watching a lot of Jerry Lewis movies. My parents didn't like him. As I got older, I started watching his movies and I became a fan. Jerry Lewis was a genius when it came to filmmaking. He might have actually been able to pull that movie off. Sadly, we'll never really know.

Bottom line, Jerry Lewis made a good movie. With all the doubt that the idea behind the movie that was created, none of it adds up to the fact that Jerry Lewis made a movie worth watching and worth talking about. My previous review covered why the movie was shelved and had given multiple reasons why due to endless speculations that have come from the mystery on the movie. Now, with this amazing documentary, the mystery has less speculation and more promises behind the reason why it was made. I was not expecting the amount of empathy that Jerry Lewis accepted in his struggles to make this movie. That alone showed his devotion to not only his craft as an Artist but his strong devotion to telling an important story with an equal message.

I see from another review that this film was marketed to TV. And indeed it starts like a TV program, with a set of teasers to convince you to watch. And it claims to solve the last great mystery of cinematic history-- the mystery of what went wrong with Jerry Lewis's never-released film "The Day the Clown Cried." The documentary does apparently provide a definitive answer regarding the project's collapse as a business venture, and it shows us Lewis's own dissatisfaction with the footage although Lewis's own feelings and behavior are more difficult to explain and may to some extent remain a mystery forever. We do see several minutes of "The Day the Clown Cried," and it's obvious (to me at least) that one major mistake was casting Jerry Lewis himself as a German civilian in World War II when the New Jersey whine couldn't help creeping into his voice and putting him apart from the non-American actors playing the other Germans. Other criticisms are brought up, and they're all thought-provoking, even if-- unlike some of the interviewees-- you don't consider Jerry Lewis a great genius of 20th-century cinema.

I give this doc an '8' as well. The extended scenes taken from The Day The Clown Cried when put next to 'Life Is Beautiful' shows how lacking it was in every department - Production, directing, casting, acting (mid-level Hogan's Hero's) and especially writing. Jerry looks back on it very intelligently, however. And you see it's failure from the word 'go' is a constant source of torture for him. The documentary is probably best looked at as a bio of Jerry Lewis himself more than the film and of that it's a success. I liked his few late life serious acting roles which I thought were always first-rate.