From Darkness to Light

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.

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 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.

An interesting and watchable documentary that I cannot help but feel is taken way too seriously by the film makers. It appears, to me at least, that they regard Lewis' not being able to finish his holocaust comedy/drama as a tragedy almost commensurate with that of Welles not having the final cut on "Magnificent Ambersons" and that the film's producer, Nat Wachsberger, to whom they assign the blame for this iniquity, is such an odious philistine that his face must be blocked from our view. I mean, talk about comedy! The fact is that, based on Lewis' own, unusually honest assessment and the out takes that are shown, Wachsberger did Lewis' reputation a favor by pulling the plug on the bathetic, pretentious embarrassment that is "The Day The Clown Cried". B minus.

"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.