We're this close to seeing The Day The Clown Cried

Big news that I don't think has been reported here yet...

A copy of Jerry Lewis's legendary lost film, The Day the Clown Cried, has been sent to the Library of Congress - but it can't be shown for another decade.

See here for the news.

Why does anyone even want to see it? Isn't it universally considered awful by those who have watched it?

Because the majority of people have never seen how awful it is, and frankly, some of us want to see if those people are right or not.

No one wants a trainwreck to happen, but everyone wants to see one.

There's a famous article from "Spy" magazine that interviewed people who were familiar with the film. Harry Shearer apparently saw the rough cut. He called it "a perfect object", in that it was so perfectly wrong.

Yeah, I'd love to see it.

I wanna see it in order to riff it.

Even if it's painful. Can't be worse than F.A.R.T.

edited 18th Aug '15 1:32:41 PM by Quag15

Hm, looks like the "Spy" article is no longer on the internet, but it IS on the archive.

1992: "Jerry Goes to Death Camp"

(btw it was in no way necessary to use clowns to lure kids into gas chambers, guns and dogs did the trick)

Yeah, but using clowns is funnier.

I guess we're OK with making trope pages for works that are lost or unseen? I know of work pages for this movie and The Burning of Red Lotus Temple.

There are trope pages for unpublished personal works, so... yeah.

So...yeah...but why?

Ugh, reading that link above, it sounds like the whole thing is just uncomfortable. Those pictures of Lewis acting like Jerry Lewis are cringeworthy, and i can only imagine that being put into this horrible, serious context.

Thing is, i can also understand the appeal of this piece. I could see it being an incredibly powerful film, and (as the article from 1992 suggested), it would have been great in Robin Williams' hands, since he could bring a maudlin weight into his characters.

Robin Williams did a Holocaust film.

People went to see it.

In no universe do those two sentences make any kind of logical, rational, comprehensible sense.

I'm just saying i can see the point, of having this beaten-down clown, thrown into political prisoner concentration camp, and then used by the commandants to entertain the children bound for the death camps. It would be a perspective on the "Kapos," the prisoners who collaborated with the Nazis for privilege within the camps, and re-drive the point home about how awful the thing was.

Though if it were up to me, we'd start exploring some other tragedies of that nature to help explore new perspectives. My point is just that there's a very good idea buried in here, it just seems to have been picked up by the wrong comedian and then subjected to Development Hell on top of that.

The thing is, it's just so difficult to imagine the Nazis seeing any need to 'entertain' prisoners, regardless of age. They treated those people far worse than we treat cattle; if they wanted them to do anything or go anywhere; they'd just push them around with a gun.

In the plot of the movie, this is kind of justified. The Nazis don't want Jerry Lewis's character around the Jewish kids, but when they're taken to be gassed, they have to use him to keep the kids quiet so the townspeople don't get curious about what they're really doing.

A new development has come up in this story...

Somebody made an edit from clips that have been legally released - I believe - as part of a German documentary.

For another 9 years this is as close as we will get to seeing this film.

Is really that bad of a movie we need to wait so much? it feel like overkill, even the premise sound good: the nazi capture a clown and use it because....why not? they did wait stupider things around

Just going by the title alone, I thought it was about the Hartford circus fire, but evidently not.