The holy grail of unseen films

In 1972, Jerry Lewis made a film about a man who is a clown in the circus during World War II. He is captured, thrown into a concentration camp, and forced to work entertaining children who are in line for the gas chamber.

It's called The Day The Clown Cried. You're already feeling the comedy, I can tell. From descriptions, it seems to be a bonanza of top-to-bottom what were they thinking? moments.

Shawn Levy's brilliant biography of the onetime funnyman devotes the better part of a chapter to the making of the movie (done in a decade when Jerry was, shall we say, not at his best) and there have been lengthy magazine articles examining it as well.

For a number of legal and creative reasons, this film has never been released, and may never be. But it continues to exert a kind of horrific fascination on the same sort of people who, had it been real, would have adored Springtime For Hitler as a comedy.

It has attained well-nigh legendary status from the eyewitness reports of the handful of people who have been allowed to see it...and now, for the first time ever, you can be among them. Our friend Mark Evanier has obtained a lengthy series of clips from the film and, as a public service to cinematic historians everywhere, made them availble on his web site.

I hope you enjoy.