Article Image

IPFS News Link • Entertainment: Movies

The Day the Clown Cried

• by Jerry Lewis, Joan O'Brien

The film was met with controversy regarding its premise and content, which features a circus clown who is imprisoned in a Nazi concentration camp. Lewis repeatedly insisted that The Day the Clown Cried would never be released because it is an embarrassingly "bad work" of which he was ashamed.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0068451/

A circus clown is imprisoned by the Nazis and goes with Jewish children to their deaths.

Director: Jerry Lewis

http://variety.com/2016/film/columns/the-day-the-clown-cried-jerry-lewis-1201798751/

Jerry Lewis' 'The Day the Clown Cried': Outrageously Awful…Or Ahead of its Time?

When you watch a movie you haven't seen for a long time (like, say, 10 or 20 years), it can look extraordinarily different from how it looked before. And that's a fascinating thing to behold, given that the movie itself hasn't changed one bit. It's you that's changed — or, just as likely, the era around you. In the case of "The Day the Clown Cried," the infamous Jerry Lewis Holocaust drama that no one — save Harry Shearer — has ever seen, because it has never been shown, the passage of time may work in even more mysterious ways. About 30 minutes of this legendary 1972 fiasco, which Lewis wrote, directed, and starred in, then permanently shelved because he was embarrassed by how bad it was, surfaced in a rough assemblage on YouTube a couple of days ago. Bits of the footage have leaked out before (most of it lifted from a German documentary about the making of the film), but this is the first chance that anyone has really had to glimpse the full-scale, jaw-through-the-floor "The Day the Clown Cried" experience. And here's the surprise: The movie does look pretty awful, but it no longer looks shockingly awful. If anything, its kitschy-ghastly four-hankie macabre shamelessness now seems both clueless and weirdly ahead of its time.


www.BlackMarketFridays.com