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.

This is a documentary of the legendary 'lost' Jerry Lewis 1972 film, "The Day The Clown Cried". Jerry plays political prisoner Helmet the clown in a Nazi concentration camp where he is eventually given the task of leading a group of kids to gleefully walk into the gas chamber.

The early section has a lot of present day celebrities and commentators talking about the rumors of the legend. Harry Shearer is one of the few who claims to have seen a copy. Apparently, some film cans of the working copy were secreted away from the bankrupt production house on their way to the trash. This does show some clips of the unfinished film. Some scenes are enlightening on the tone of the film, but it is tough to know if it's actually good or not. I don't think that this can be a comedy and that's the central question.

The big difficulty for the production is a lying producer who didn't get the rights to the story. In one section, Jerry confesses that the film is not good. He does pull it back by saying that it's almost wonderful which is not good enough. It's a dodge. I find myself wanting to call Jerry out on some of his comments. I'm not sure that he has a grasp on what the film needs to achieve. This is also well before Life is Beautiful and I've always felt that Life's broad comedy never worked due to the subject matter. It would have been great to have Jerry finish the movie. It would have been controversial and maybe set him on a different path.

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.

FROM DARKNESS TO LIGHT (2024) Well done documentary on the history of Jerry Lewis' legendary uncompleted THE DAY THE CLOWN CRIED (circa 1972). Over the decades, much of the speculation has focused on why Lewis never finished the film and why he didn't "allow" it to be shown. A couple of years before his passing in 2017, Lewis' materials were donated to the Library of Congress with the proviso that they not be shown until this year (some scholars have seen the half hour incomplete assemblage - as well as, Harry Shearer).

What Directors Michael Lurie and Eric Friedler do so well in this documentary is to trace the film's ill-fated progress which led to Lewis abandoning the project - or, did the project abandon him? It's generously illustrated with both behind the scenes footage of the film being made as well as raw footage of CLOWN itself (presented mostly chronologically, one can put together a shortened rough cut of what the final film might have been like).

Still, the real coup here was their ability to get Jerry Lewis himself to sit down and talk at length about the trials and tribulations of making the film - and its aftermath that haunted him to the grave. Lewis had long grown weary of discussing his "failure", but here, shortly before his death, he opens up. Of course, being Lewis, one must always be leery of how truthful he is at all points. Still, he seems refreshingly frank for the most part. His deep self-criticism of himself as a writer, director and actor rings true. Honestly, much of the CLOWN footage backs up his hesitance about what he made.

The behind the scenes machinations about getting the film produced are astonishing themselves, with the shocking reveal that the underlying rights were never properly secured - nor was the footage! Just as disturbing is just how far the screenplay of CLOWN itself goes. OMG. OMG! OMG!! Give Lewis credit for following the story to its horrifying conclusion.

THE DAY THE CLOWN CRIED is such a holy grail (or is it "Unholy"?) that it's best that it was never completed nor released. No single film could ever match one's expectations of it - for good or for ill. The surviving footage is sufficient to approximate what Lewis and the unfinished film would have been like. Make no mistake here - THE DAY THE CLOWN CRIED does not exist as a full motion picture. There is missing footage. Scenes never filmed. Even the edited sequences are very rough. Most importantly, Lewis isn't here to edit nor complete whatever exists into his vision. An extraordinary amount of digital work would have to be done just to make it presentable even as an extended short subject.

Let it be.

For now, FROM DARKNESS TO LIGHT (and a German documentary, DER CLOWN) is sufficient evidence of the production. Some things are best left to fate.

FROM DARKNESS TO LIGHT had it's U. S. premiere on TCM. So far no further screenings have been publically announced.

What happened to Jerry Lewis's unreleased movie THE DAY THE CLOWN CRIED? Interviews with Lewis, Martin Scorsese, Pierre Etaix and other people involved in the production are intermingled with extended clips from the film.

It's hard to think of Lewis as a serious film maker. He seems to be a maker of faces with the occasional small extended gag. Yet anyone who can actually do it will tell you that making people laugh is a difficult procedure, and directing it effectively for the screen is harder yet. Lewis did the former for twenty years, and the latter for ten until the pressure of doing both got to him and he decided he wanted to prove himself as a serious film maker and actor. Traditionally, all clown want to play Hamlet. Instead it was a movie about a broken-down clown who keeps the children happy in a concentration camp.

And between the shoddiness of his producers and his own inability to thread that needle, it broke him as a film maker. He didn't direct so much as a TV show for seven years, nor appear in a movie for nine, when he appeared in Scorsese's THE KING OF COMEDY, where his performance made the point: if you take away the things that delight us with laughter, what you are left is a serious actor. And his later interviews in which he talks about his "lost" movie -- which resides at the Library of Congress -- make me wonder what he might have done with HAMLET: not as the lead, but as the director.