An Unreleased Holocaust Movie Will Finally Be Shown - Here's Why It's So Controversial

Jewish directors and writers have managed to create pathos from the Holocaust through pieces of fiction with panache. But none of them have approached the topic like Jerry Lewis. His attempt at creating a story of redemption from the subject, 1972's "The Day the Clown Cried," resulted in a notorious film that was never completed and has never seen the light of day due to a stipulation in his will. 

Lewis didn't want the apparently incomplete film — which he donated in some state to the Library of Congress in 2015 — to be screened until after June 2024. But it looks like portions of the movie will be publicly shown just after that date, at August's Venice Film Festival. These unseen clips will be woven into a documentary entitled "From Darkness to Light," which covers the director-actor-producer's attempt at mounting the film. It will be seen in the Venice's Classics portion of the festival. 

The movie's tale centers around the past-his-prime circus clown Helmut Doork (Lewis), who is arrested and interred in a concentration camp after he's caught mocking Adolf Hitler in public. His arrogance makes him unpopular among his fellow political prisoners, but he finds worth in entertaining groups of Jewish children imprisoned on the opposite side of a barbed wire fence. The camp's guards initially try to stop Doork from performing before realizing his skills are useful. They then manipulate him into entertaining children being loaded onto train cars headed to extermination camps. This ultimately leads to Doork's redemption, as he refuses to abandon a group of kids and ultimately joins them in a gas chamber. It's definitely a heavy subject – and one Lewis thought he did a disservice to. 

"The Day the Clown Cried" was heavily plagued by financial difficulties during its shooting. Though Jerry Lewis did what he could to make sure people got paid and the production kept going, the finished version remained something of a disappointment to him. "You will never see it, no one will ever see it, because I am embarrassed at the poor work," he said during a press conference at the 2013 Cannes Film Festival, per Reuters.

While Lewis claims that the film was not screened publicly, actor Harry Shearer claimed he witnessed a private projection in a 1992 article in Spy Magazine (via Ain't it Cool News).  "With most of these kinds of things, you find that the anticipation, or the concept, is better than the thing itself. But seeing this film was really awe-inspiring, in that you are rarely in the presence of a perfect object. [...] This movie is so drastically wrong, its pathos and its comedy are so wildly misplaced, that you could not, in your fantasy of what it might be like, improve on what it really is. "Oh My God!" – that's all you can say." 

Others, such as Jean-Michel Frodon, a film critic, claim they saw it during further screenings and found the film to be admirable. 

Since Lewis died at the age of 91 in 2017 due to cardiac disease, we'll never find out how he feels about a bit more of his so-called worst production entering the world. But at least audiences will — bit by bit and piece by piece — slowly begin to judge the movie and its' beloved-by-Hollywood star for themselves.