Effectively deleted by actor and filmmaker Jerry Lewis, 1972’s The Day The Clown Cried has reportedly been found on VHS.
One of the most infamous films of the 1970s is also one that vanishingly few people have seen. Written, directed and starring Jerry Lewis, The Day The Clown Cried was shot in 1972 but soon shelved. A comedy drama set in a Nazi concentration camp, it became the source of so much regret that Lewis himself insisted that it never be released; footage is kept in a Library Of Congress vault, but other than a few stills and clips, his film has never been made public.
According to actor Hans Crispin, however, a complete copy of The Day The Clown Cried does exist in the wild – albeit on VHS. The story goes that Crispin managed to liberate a workprint of the film from the production company Europafilm in 1980, and that he still has it in his possession 35 years later. As covered by AV Club and The National, Crispin backed up his claims by screening the film to a pair of Swedish journalists.
If true, this means that Crispin has in his possession the most complete version of The Day The Clown Cried known to be in existence; the footage at the Library of Congress is said to be out of sequence and unfinished. Since he took it in 1980, Crispin says he’s occasionally shown it to visitors, and that while his copy was originally six minutes of footage from its opening, an anonymous donor later sent him the missing sequence through the post.
Read more: 10 major films that have been shelved or scrapped over the past decade
“I have the only copy,” Crispin told the Swedish TV channel SVT. “I stole it from Europafilm in 1980 and copied it to VHS in the attic where we copied other films at night. I’ve kept the copy in my bank vault.”
Crispin now says that he wants to “hand it over to the next generation.”
“With today’s technique, it can be restored,” he says. “I want to sell it to a serious producer who either restores it or keeps it locked away, or restores it and shows it to people for studying purposes.”
About a washed-up circus clown who performs for Jewish prisoners in Auschwitz, the film was already surrounded by copyright issues before Lewis decided to shelve it. Assuming the VHS copy is in good enough shape to be restored, it’s unclear how easy it would be for the film to get an official release.
Lewis passed away in 2017, two years after he submitted his footage to the Library of Congress. Lewis once said to a reporter, “It was bad work. You’ll never see it and neither will anyone else.” There’s still a fascination surrounding The Day The Clown Cried, however. Perhaps this most infamous of films will one day get a release after all.
