From Darkness to Light

I see from another review that this film was marketed to TV. And indeed it starts like a TV program, with a set of teasers to convince you to watch. And it claims to solve the last great mystery of cinematic history-- the mystery of what went wrong with Jerry Lewis's never-released film "The Day the Clown Cried." The documentary does apparently provide a definitive answer regarding the project's collapse as a business venture, and it shows us Lewis's own dissatisfaction with the footage although Lewis's own feelings and behavior are more difficult to explain and may to some extent remain a mystery forever. We do see several minutes of "The Day the Clown Cried," and it's obvious (to me at least) that one major mistake was casting Jerry Lewis himself as a German civilian in World War II when the New Jersey whine couldn't help creeping into his voice and putting him apart from the non-American actors playing the other Germans. Other criticisms are brought up, and they're all thought-provoking, even if-- unlike some of the interviewees-- you don't consider Jerry Lewis a great genius of 20th-century cinema.

A current documentary on the infamously abandoned Jerry Lewis holocaust vehicle The Day the Clown Cried. Back in the early 70's Lewis set out to make a film about a circus clown who ends up in a concentration group who manages to keep the spirits of the children up while imprisoned there until the wheels of cruelty move them towards their ultimate fate. Lewis felt he had a winner on his hands as evidenced by the various talk shows he went on at the time where he was hyping the near completion of it but then through budget cuts from an unreliable producer & the dawning realization the material was not shaping up to his standards put the film's release into limbo for many years which even by the time of his death & asked about it, he'd say the project was dead. Through interviews w/some of the survivors of the project w/Lewis himself interviewed in length before his passing, we get an idea of what went wrong (especially those who have seen an assembly of the film like Harry Shearer). A fascinating watch since I'd heard about this film within the last few years w/this doc providing actual scenes cobbled together so an audience could make heads or tails of what could've been. Considering subsequent films like the Oscar winning Life is Beautiful & I think Robin Williams made one entitled Jakob the Liar, one wonders if Lewis' take on similar material might've beaten the others to the gate for acclaim & recognition. We'll never know.

An interesting and watchable documentary that I cannot help but feel is taken way too seriously by the film makers. It appears, to me at least, that they regard Lewis' not being able to finish his holocaust comedy/drama as a tragedy almost commensurate with that of Welles not having the final cut on "Magnificent Ambersons" and that the film's producer, Nat Wachsberger, to whom they assign the blame for this iniquity, is such an odious philistine that his face must be blocked from our view. I mean, talk about comedy! The fact is that, based on Lewis' own, unusually honest assessment and the out takes that are shown, Wachsberger did Lewis' reputation a favor by pulling the plug on the bathetic, pretentious embarrassment that is "The Day The Clown Cried". B minus.

Bottom line, Jerry Lewis made a good movie. With all the doubt that the idea behind the movie that was created, none of it adds up to the fact that Jerry Lewis made a movie worth watching and worth talking about. My previous review covered why the movie was shelved and had given multiple reasons why due to endless speculations that have come from the mystery on the movie. Now, with this amazing documentary, the mystery has less speculation and more promises behind the reason why it was made. I was not expecting the amount of empathy that Jerry Lewis accepted in his struggles to make this movie. That alone showed his devotion to not only his craft as an Artist but his strong devotion to telling an important story with an equal message.

What happened to Jerry Lewis's unreleased movie THE DAY THE CLOWN CRIED? Interviews with Lewis, Martin Scorsese, Pierre Etaix and other people involved in the production are intermingled with extended clips from the film.

It's hard to think of Lewis as a serious film maker. He seems to be a maker of faces with the occasional small extended gag. Yet anyone who can actually do it will tell you that making people laugh is a difficult procedure, and directing it effectively for the screen is harder yet. Lewis did the former for twenty years, and the latter for ten until the pressure of doing both got to him and he decided he wanted to prove himself as a serious film maker and actor. Traditionally, all clown want to play Hamlet. Instead it was a movie about a broken-down clown who keeps the children happy in a concentration camp.

And between the shoddiness of his producers and his own inability to thread that needle, it broke him as a film maker. He didn't direct so much as a TV show for seven years, nor appear in a movie for nine, when he appeared in Scorsese's THE KING OF COMEDY, where his performance made the point: if you take away the things that delight us with laughter, what you are left is a serious actor. And his later interviews in which he talks about his "lost" movie -- which resides at the Library of Congress -- make me wonder what he might have done with HAMLET: not as the lead, but as the director.