Cinema completionists and fans of unreleased movies appeared to receive their Holy Grail last week when reports began to circulate that “The Day the Clown Cried,” Jerry Lewis‘ infamous Holocaust movie that has never seen the light of day, would be screened at the Library of Congress in 2024.
Lewis spent decades disavowing the film, which he directed and stars in as a circus clown imprisoned in a Nazi concentration camp, but ultimately donated his footage from it to the Library of Congress in 2014. The deal stipulated that the footage could not be screened for 10 years, meaning that 2024 would be the first year that it could be made public. Lewis died in 2017.
However, a representative for the Library of Congress confirmed to IndieWire that no public screenings are planned, as the archive does not possess a complete cut of the film. The footage donated by Lewis contains several unedited scenes from the film and several sound reels (which may or may not align with the film footage), and those portions will be made available to scholars for research later this year. But anyone hoping to watch the infamous film in its entirety will have to manage their expectations.
While the mystique surrounding the film has only grown in the 50 years since production on it concluded, those who claim to have seen it have had very harsh words about it. Harry Shearer famously said that the rough cut of the film that he saw was worse than he could have imagined.
“Seeing this film was really awe-inspiring, in that you are rarely in the presence of a perfect object,” Shearer said. “This was 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.”
Reporting by Christian Blauvelt.
