I Watched Footage of Jerry Lewis’s Unreleased 1972 Holocaust Film

3:30 A.M. WAKE-UP

4:00 A.M. HOMEWORK

6:00 A.M. BREAKFAST – DRESS

6:30 A.M. DRIVE TO STUDIO

7:00 A.M. RUSHES!

8:30 A.M. LOCATION – MAKE-UP

9:00 A.M. DRESS

9:30 A.M. SHOOT INT. HUT

1:00 P.M. LUNCH

2:00 P.M. SHOOT EXT. HUT

2:30 P.M. “THE CHAMBER”

5:00 P.M. SHOOT

8:30 P.M. WRAP CREW

9:00 P.M. GOODBYES!!

9:30 P.M. DRIVE TO HOTEL

10:00 P.M. PACK

11:30 P.M. DINNER

1:00 A.M. SNOOZE

Much of the 90 minutes of dailies are from this very day, as well as the couple of days preceding it. The footage is haunting. There are repeated takes of Lewis as Doork, on the verge of tears, leading the children from the hut they are kept in at Auschwitz. In take after take, they walk in a long procession to the gas chamber while Doork tries to mollify them—commanded to do so in order to be spared. Most evocative is the image of Doork changing his mind at the last minute and choosing to die with the children, grabbing a little girl’s hand and leading her into the chamber. A guard closes and locks the door behind them, and the camera pans up to show the chimney, foreshadowing their fate.

By the time that Lewis agreed to direct and star in The Day the Clown Cried, he had been a household comedy name for a quarter-century: as the funny man of the famed duo Martin and Lewis, as the star of box office hits like 1963’s The Nutty Professor, and as the host of the Muscular Dystrophy Labor Day Telethon, which raised millions of dollars annually (Lewis’s brand of physical comedy would inspire successful actors ranging from Steve Martin to Jim Carrey to Nicolas Cage). It was undoubtedly bizarre to watch Lewis don the familiar concentration-camp iconography of striped gray pants while wearing a red nose and white face paint, but the scenes I saw reveal a depth to the pairing of Lewis and the Holocaust that belied its reputation as irredeemable. Among the range of emotions I experienced, offense was not one of them—something I cannot say for most of Hollywood’s Holocaust films.

More than 50 years after it was filmed, The Day the Clown Cried is provoking a surge of interest. In addition to Lewis’s footage being made available at the Library of Congress, a documentary about it is premiering at this year’s Venice Film Festival, and producer Kia Jam just acquired rights to the script. Perhaps its reputation is in for a renovation. Having seen Lewis’s footage, I find it hard to believe that the movie would stand out among Holocaust films as uniquely campy or profane, had it been properly finished and released in cinemas. The footage I saw of the film’s ending is not distasteful to me like the conclusion to the family movie The Boy in the Striped Pajamas, in which the concentration camp commandant’s young son and his Jewish friend are mistakenly led into the gas chamber—the camera revealing a man wearing a gas mask pouring Zyklon B overhead. After all, there are plenty of bad Holocaust films out there, whether blindingly sentimental, historically inaccurate, or just poorly made. If anything, the film most closely resembling The Day the Clown Cried is the Academy Award-winning and oft-celebrated La vita è bella, or Life is Beautiful, with one simple yet extraordinary difference: in the words of French film critic Jean-Michel Frodon, Lewis “does not dance around the subject matter, the extermination of Jews by the Nazis, including the mass killing of children.”