From Darkness to Light

One of the longest held myths/mysteries in the Hollywood film community is if a film called "The Day the Clown Cried" directed and written by, and starring Jerry Lewis does or ever did exist, Lewis having talked about it in interviews in the early 1970s including having stated his plan to have it imminently premiere at Cannes. There was much controversy surrounding the movie not only in that it was Lewis in a serio-comic role in a serio-comic movie, he known solely as a comedian at the time, but the taboo subject matter of the movie especially for anything containing comic elements: the Holocaust. The swath of Holocaust movies would not emerge until half a decade later, most notably similarly serio-comic Life Is Beautiful (1997) a quarter of a century later. Lewis purportedly portrayed a Jewish clown in a concentration camp who was tasked to entertain the children of the camp as they were being sent to the gas chamber. Whenever asked over the decades, Lewis would refuse to talk about it, that is until he broke his silence just prior to his death, in conjunction with the discovery of reels of what is the unfinished movie (The Day the Clown Cried (1972)). Lewis talks about the process of making the movie and what happened to leave it abandoned and unfinished. Lewis breaking his silence allowed other survivors associated to the movie now able to break theirs, they generally corroborating Lewis' stories. Contemporaries of Lewis also talk about his place in the history of entertainment, in front of and behind the camera, and in both comic and dramatic capacities.