In the 1970s, legendary American film star Jerry Lewis shot a movie featuring several of Sweden’s biggest actors. Then it vanished without a trace—until now.
Italian director Roberto Benigni is said to have been inspired by the script of the missing film when he made the classic Life is Beautiful.
Inspired, yes—but he never saw the film. That much is confirmed by actor and TV personality Hans Crispin (yes, Angne from Angne och Svullo).
“You and the photographer are the 23rd and 24th people I’ve shown it to. In 45 years! And I have the only copy. I stole it from Europafilm in 1980 and dubbed it to VHS—in the attic where we used to copy porn at night,” he says.
Hans Crispin decided to tell the story and screen the film for Kulturnyheterna’s Caroline Hainer, a film critic, a few weeks ago. She and the magazine Icon recount the tale in the issue released today (May 28). After that, Kulturnyheterna got to see the film Crispin stole 45 years ago.
But let’s start from the beginning—
The legend of Jerry Lewis’s lost film begins in 1972, when he came to Stockholm to shoot The Day the Clown Cried. A film that stood in stark contrast to the screwball comedies that had made him famous in the 1960s.
But The Day the Clown Cried was something else entirely. Jerry Lewis plays a German clown named Helmut Dork who, during World War II, tries to entertain children in a concentration camp. He makes them laugh all the way to the end—in the gas chamber.
A long list of Sweden’s top actors at the time were hired to play prisoners and Nazi commanders: Lars Amble, Ulf Palme, and Sven Lindberg. Harriet Andersson plays Jerry Lewis’s wife.
But the production ended abruptly. Jerry Lewis left Sweden with the final film reels and decided the film would never be shown. In the mid-2010s, he admitted why: it turned out too badly.
“A Myth”
In 2024, the German documentary From Darkness to Light was screened at the Venice Film Festival. Martin Scorsese appears and refers to the film as a myth.
Online forums call The Day the Clown Cried the Holy Grail of film history. Fragments and clips have been found and stitched together by dedicated enthusiasts. Many hoped a copy of the film might reside in the Library of Congress in Washington, where Lewis donated materials late in life—on the condition that they not be made public until 2025. But on New Year’s Day this year, only a script and partial reels with separate audio were found.
“Ha! I’ve got an original script too,” says Hans Crispin—“in fact, several of them.”
Originally published by SVT Nyheter on May 27, 2025.
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