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.

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 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.

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.

Like its subject, From Darkness to Light is not entirely complete, but it doesn't cut the viewer short on some jaw-dropping revelations. The Day the Clown Cried has always been an odd fascination with me, as is the case with a lot of lost or rare media, and this is as close as we'll ever probably get to seeing the film in its entirety. The documentary stems from a place of affection and respect, Lurie and Friedler giving us a compelling account of how this beloved entertainer tackled the darkest subjects. The duo 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 from the film itself, presented mostly chronologically. 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. Painting a picture of a compelling story of Hollywood hubris that's by turns moving, shocking and blackly funny, whether or not The Day the Clown Cried will ever receive a release remains to be seen, but we can always hope.