To this day, the idea of it is flabbergasting: Jerry Lewis directing and starring in a film about a former circus clown entertaining children in Nazi death camps – and even leading them into the gas chamber.
It was an equally bizarre notion, maybe even more so, in the early 1970s, when the Holocaust was fresh in the nation’s collective mind and Lewis was a mawkish but beloved comedian and director, by that point perhaps best-known for his annual Labor Day Muscular Dystrophy telethons, but whose 1960s films were not only huge comedy hits but also groundbreaking: he pioneered the use of video screens for directors to consult during filming.
The 2024 documentary “From Darkness to Light,” about Lewis’ ill-fated attempt to make his Holocaust movie, “The Day the Clown Cried,” examines Lewis’ quest to make “Clown” without dismissing the idea that it was an exercise in filmmaking hubris.
There’s no bigger critic of Lewis in the documentary than Lewis himself, who calls his film “bad work” and notes, “I just didn’t pull it off” in interviews conducted for the documentary before his death in 2017. By that point, Lewis’ legendary ego was either gone or hidden; but one gets the feeling that when he was criticizing his own work, he was hoping someone would contradict him.
At any rate, “From Darkness to Light,” directed by Michael Lurie and Eric Friedler, is a fascinating look at a wrongheaded artistic effort and one of the most bizarre films to never be completed and released to theaters.
From the telethon to World War II horrors
Jerry Lewis was a major cultural figure in my life and the lives of my movie-and-TV-obsessed friends in the 1960s and 1970s.
The first movie I saw in a movie theater was, I’m pretty sure, Lewis’ “Who’s Minding the Store?” released in late 1963 but playing in my hometown in January 1964. The fact that I threw up on the sidewalk outside the theater after the movie was not early film criticism but can probably be blamed on whatever I had for lunch.
My friends and I watched his Labor Day weekend telethon every year, enthralled by the kitsch and atmosphere that ranged from manic to maudlin. In the 1970s, a group of us who had raised money for the Muscular Dystrophy Association through our Star Trek club – we were well-meaning geeks, friends – appeared on an Indianapolis segment of the telethon.
So as pre-teen or early teen film fanatics in the early 1970s, we were amazed at the idea of Lewis making a film about the Holocaust. World War II and Hitler’s “Final Solution” were familiar to us; our fathers had served in the Army during the war. The idea that Lewis – undeniably a comedic genius and accomplished director of comedies with some serious aspects – would make such a film was, when we read about it in newspapers, stupefying to us. What a bizarre thought.
(That we were serious about our pop culture obsessions was undeniable. A few years later, we were beside ourselves when coverage of Gerald Ford’s pardon of Richard Nixon pre-empted a TV movie version of “Dracula” starring Jack Palance.)
In those pre-internet days, the sum of what we knew about most of pop culture – not withstanding genre-focused magazines like “Famous Monsters of Filmland” – came from newspapers, TV newscasts and nightly ritualistic viewing of “The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson.” How else do you think kids from a small city in Indiana knew so much about jazz legends like Buddy Rich and Catskills comedians?
So while we were attuned to news about this extraordinary – and extraordinarily ill-conceived, we believed – Lewis project, we didn’t hear much about it.
The “From Darkness to Light” documentary even includes TV footage of Lewis bantering with Carson about “The Day the Clown Cried.” There’s no context about the guest spot other than to indicate that Lewis knew the film was in trouble by that point. Nevertheless, he jokes when Carson asks him about the film coming out in the spring (of whatever year the interview took place, probably 1973). “Spring?” Lewis cracks. “I better get to work on the last reels.”
“From Darkness to Light” depicts how ill-fated the film was: it was a passion project for Lewis and he was an accomplished director – again, of comedies. For “The Day the Clown Cried,” the documentary reports, Lewis had more than an incredibly unlikely premise to overcome. He also had to deal with a producer who was perhaps dishonest with him and funding that began to flow away from the production after weeks of shooting in Sweden and France.
Scorsese: ‘We thought it was a myth’
To watch “From Darkness to Light” is to be reminded that Lewis was highly regarded as a filmmaker in France and indeed, maybe retroactively, in the entire film world. Footage of Lewis being interviewed about “Clown” by French reporters is included. The documentary interviews director Martin Scorsese, who had been making films since 1967 but whose career was about to take an upward trajectory with “Mean Streets” in 1973, about the time people were wondering if “The Day the Clown Cried” would ever see a projection room.
Scorsese says, in effect, that Lewis was a talented director but the idea that he would make “The Day the Clown Cried” had seemed very unlikely. “We thought it was a myth,” Scorsese tells the documentarians. You and me both, Marty.
Another accomplished film director, Mel Brooks, who was about to hit a career peak in 1974 with “Young Frankenstein” and “Blazing Saddles,” and who was known for parodying Hitler and Nazis in “The Producers” back in 1967, says in no uncertain terms that projects don’t come much more misbegotten than “The Day the Clown Cried.” Brooks indicates that while Hitler and Nazis were ripe for parody – and they had been clear back to Donald Duck and Charlie Chaplin during the war itself – there was no way to find humor in the Holocaust.
And it’s hard to say, even from the extensive footage from “The Day the Clown Cried” in the documentary, just how humorous Lewis even intended to be.
Redemption and funny stuff
Lewis doesn’t tell the documentarians precisely if he intended to make a serious film with unserious aspects, but the substantial footage of “Clown” included in the documentary make that seem likely.
There are bits of Lewis performing as a sad-sack clown, especially in a French circus, that indicate he planned to use his trademark “funny stuff.” Notable from a Nazi camp scene is a moment when, as he entertains Jewish children on the other side of fence, he gets a nostril hooked on barbwire. Many of these humorous moments are Lewis acting, well, like a clown and taking pratfalls. That makes it all the more disconcerting when he takes a fall after being slapped to the ground by a Nazi camp guard. The disconcerting needle goes into the red immediately after, when a fellow prisoner tries to help and is shot to death.
Such serious scenes were shot and two things are apparent: Lewis acquits himself pretty well with his straight acting and he obviously intended to have “Clown” vary between the dramatic and the humorous.
There’s certainly poignancy – whether intentional by Lewis or not – in the idea that Helmut, Lewis’ character, is sent to the camp for mocking Hitler but wants to redeem himself, get out of the concentration camp and return to his role as a prominent clown. Lewis was smart and almost certainly intended for Helmut to be a stand-in for himself in some way.
As he says in the documentary – even while he’s praising the work of his European cast and crew, who shot the film in 1972 – he didn’t accomplish what he wanted with the film. But it’s hard to imagine what he wanted to accomplish, or how he could have accomplished it.
The documentary does make reference to “Life is Beautiful,” the 1997 Oscar-winner starring Robert Benigni as an Italian man trying to shield his son from the horrors of a concentration camp. Several people interviewed in the documentary point to “Life is Beautiful” as an indication that Lewis was ahead of his time. The only comment from Lewis, unless I missed something else, was to praise Benigni.
“From Darkness to Light” includes excerpts of interviews with an interesting assortment of Hollywood folks, from Scorsese to Gilbert Gottfried to Rob Reiner to Brooks. There are pointed comments from actor and comedian Harry Shearer, of “This is Spinal Tap” fame, legendarily one of the few people to have gone on the record as having seen “Clown.”
And besides addressing why the film was never released – it boils down to lack of money to finish it and lack of willingness on Lewis’ part to revisit his failure – there’s also time spent on the mystery behind the film, what happened to the actual physical prints and how they’ve taken on a grail-like status. Lewis himself donated rough footage, in 2015, to the Library of Congress on the condition that it not be released until 2024.
One of the best running subplots in “From Darkness to Light” is how other prints of the film were preserved, including one that was ostensibly held by a Swedish film processing and production company until Lewis or the producer paid to have it released. In the 1980s, the company was allegedly planning to discard the footage. A worker at the lab recognized the film for what it was and ensured that video duplicates of “Clown” were made. At the same time, the lab was making video copies of porn films for release through the burgeoning VHS market, but making dupes of “The Day the Clown Cried” was adjudged the most daring activity at that lab, reserved for late at night, when porn was being run off as a cover for the activity.
I wish “From Darkness to Light” had comments from Lewis about that intrigue.
