I'm not sure just how much of this article I believe as I spoke with someone a year ago who works at the Library of Congress and they told me that there is no finished/edited version of The Day the Clown Cied and that all that exists are fragments. But... only time will tell.
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.
Hi Mike,
ReplyDeleteThe story is probably true. This movie is not my area of expertise. When I was a little kid, and even a bigger kid, I thought Jerry was delightfully hilarious and he was easily one of my favorites. Now that I am a grown curmudgeon, I watched some of his stuff again and found it repulsive. Didn’t help that I saw him in person once and understood right away that there’s sumpn not right with that boy, sumpn wrong in his head — to say the least. Didn’t meet him, though, thank heaven! Just watched him in utter disbelief and revulsion. What I do know about this movie, or what I think I know about this movie, is that Jerry completed the filming but never finished putting it together. There were contractual problems and the producer began to confiscate the raw materials. When Jerry saw that most of the movie had disappeared, he grabbed the 90 or so minutes of raw footage that still remained in the editing suite and shipped it to his place in Las Vegas. That prevented the producer from using the confiscated footage to put together a complete movie. The fragments were Jerry’s bargaining chip.
At some time or another, probably while he was still engaged with the production in Europe, he hammered together a sampler, about 30 minutes, mostly mute, but enough to convey the entire storyline. German television somehow got hold of a copy, dubbed the mute parts into German, and hired some of the actors, now aged, to sit in a circle and read their lines from a couple of missing scenes. You can see this on Archive.org, with a little more footage edited in by a fan. Download it and save it before it vanishes: https://archive.org/details/project-55
It would not surprise me in the least if the confiscated materials included a rough cut, a rough cut that Jerry hoped to bargain back into his possession.
What Jerry bequeathed to the Library of Congress were the unedited fragments he had been able to sneak to Las Vegas. There is, or was, more out there somewhere. If you watch the German broadcast, I think you will agree that it is one of the most idiotically awful movies ever to belch forth from a camera. Jerry said he visited Auschwitz and did independent research to get things historically accurate? It would be difficult to be less historically accurate. Should the movie be preserved? Absolutely! It is part of the record, and, besides, Harriet Andersson is in it. That’s reason enough right there to keep the film on file and to make it available. Really, though, the movie is junk. But yeah, if I were a gambler, I would wager that Hans Crispin is really telling the truth. If he ever manages to get the thing issued somehow, I would probably break down and pay to see it, just out of curiosity. I would also be most curious to read Joan O’Brien and Charles Denton’s original script. From all reports, it is quite good. I saw a copy once at a sale table. Price? $3,000. I put it right back down and walked away. There seems to be a copy at the University of Michigan Library at Ann Arbor. If somebody is in the mood to scan it, let us know!
Ranjit