Deep Dive
Shownotes Transcript
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Everyone loves a good movie. But you know what lots of people also really love? A bad movie. And the comedian Patton Oswalt has a favorite kind of bad movie. There's nothing that I love more than something that's really bad, but the underlying attitude of it is, you're welcome. You're welcome for me bestowing this upon you. I am bringing the elixir to heal the world.
The laughter you're hearing on the other end of that call is from Decoder Ring producer Max Friedman. I called Patton Oswalt to talk about one bad movie in particular, a movie made by a comedian and filmmaker who was, in the 1950s and 60s, one of the most famous people in the world, Jerry Lewis. He wasn't tall. He wasn't handsome. He wasn't even clever.
marrying a beautiful princess. Jerry Lewis was one of those things that was just kind of always around in the atmosphere. I grew up in the 70s and 80s, so they showed his movies on TV when I was a little kid. Cinderfella, Nutty Professor, The Family Jewels. Yes, sir, we'll be going in a moment, girls. In 1972, after years of making wacky slapstick comedies, Jerry Lewis set out to direct and star in a film unlike anything he had ever done before.
A drama set during World War II called The Day the Clown Cried. Here he is explaining the premise to a French TV reporter and for some reason saying the word clown in a French accent. It is the story of a clown who was once the premier clown, who is no more the top clown and who is having a difficult time handling being just a small part of the circus.
But what makes the clown cry in The Day the Clown Cried is that he ends up in Auschwitz, where he entertains a group of Jewish children on their way to the gas chamber. Just the premise has been enough to make the film notorious, beyond imagining, something you'd have to see to believe. Except you can't see it. Almost no one ever has. The Day the Clown Cried was shot, then buried. ♪
The legend was it was so terrible that the studio wouldn't release it. But over the last 50 years, even though the film itself has been locked away, its stature has only grown as the ultimate bad movie. It became like this lost ark kind of cursed artifact, this legendary grail for film enthusiasts.
You have to talk about The Day the Clown Cried. The worst movie ever made. What's this movie about? Take a seat, because this is a doozy. Jerry Lewis made a Holocaust movie about a clown that led the children into the ovens. Can you imagine a worse thing? It's often cited by movie historians as one of the most wanted unseen films of all time. Please, if anybody has it, I'm begging people for this. We have to see this.
So, if almost no one has seen it, how is everyone so sure that it's so bad? This is Decoder Ring. I'm Max Friedman. It's hard to imagine now, but back in the early 70s, there had never really been a Holocaust movie as such. 25 years after the end of the war, Nazi death camps had still rarely appeared on screen, and almost never in a Hollywood film.
So, if Jerry Lewis had actually finished and released The Day the Clown Cried, it very well may have been a landmark in both the history of Hollywood and public memory of the Holocaust. Instead, he made a different kind of landmark. Allegedly, one of the worst movies ever. In this episode, I'm going to trace how The Day the Clown Cried went from a potential watershed to a legendary disaster, while I also try to figure out if The Day the Clown Cried deserves its reputation.
And I'm going to do all this without actually seeing the movie myself. Because even though the movie remains lost, there's actually a lot we do know about what's in it. And even more we know about Jerry Lewis. So today on Dakota Ring, should we be laughing at the day the clown cried?
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I'm about 20 years younger than Patton Oswalt, and so I did not grow up with Jerry Lewis in the atmosphere. I saw The Nutty Professor as a kid, and I was vaguely aware of the annual Jerry Lewis telethon, but I don't think I knew just how big he had been in his prime. Jerry was, at various times in his career, the highest-paid performer on radio, television, movies, live stage, nightclubs, and Broadway. ♪
Sean Levy is the author of about a dozen books about film and pop culture, including King of Comedy: The Life and Art of Jerry Lewis. Jerry started being well known in the late 1940s for the act he began with Dean Martin. And now, the Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis Show! It was chic.
People, like, would go to the Copacabana. You couldn't get a ticket. Martin and Lewis worked their way up from nightclubs to become superstars in radio, movies, and television. Like a pizza and wine, everything fine. Lasagna for you, bagels for mine. We belong together.
Their act was built on the contrast between Dino, the suave crooner, and Jerry, who played a character he nicknamed The Kid. He was sort of a man-child. You know, he was six foot, maybe six foot one, dressed elegantly. But when he was performing, he would do a wheedling, squealing voice, sort of lose control of his limbs. Jerry, it's your mother from New Jersey, Newark. She heard me all the way.
Oh, I'm so excited. Uh-huh-huh. After Martin and Lewis broke up in 1956, Jerry became even more famous. He put out a hit record, played sold-out residencies in Vegas and on Broadway, hosted the Oscars three times, started to produce his own movies, and eventually to direct them, too. He was the first comedian in the sound era to start directing himself in Hollywood films.
And he was prolific. In ten years, he directed ten movies and appeared in ten more besides. Well into his 30s, he continued to play variations of the kid in movies like The Delicate Delinquent, The Disorderly Orderly, The Bellboy, The Errand Boy, The Geisha Boy. I'm talking, you know, the mitzvah, white novel.
As silly as these movies are, they still reveal a lot about the man who made them. They're not distinguished as cinema. They're more distinguished, I think, as personal expression of this man with a very complex personality. For example, you can tell from Jerry's films that he was deeply sentimental about children. He treats children like Fabergé eggs.
He will cut to shots of him crying over a child being cute or a child being sad. The idea that there's a lost innocence. And Jerry is special because he can recognize and tap into that innocence. And that's because Jerry himself felt like he didn't have a real childhood. His parents were itinerant show people. Jerry was often left in the care of his maternal grandmother while his parents played in vaudeville houses and the borscht belt.
Almost every Jerry Lewis movie is about a schlemiel who becomes a hero, like his most famous and also probably his best film, The Nutty Professor. Which is the Jekyll and Hyde story about a nebbishy chemistry professor. Were it not for your assisting me, I might very well be here all semester. Who makes a concoction and he becomes this suave lady killer jazz bow guy named Buddy Love. Mood is wrong. Innkeeper. Got sexy lights? Lay it on me.
Offscreen, Jerry was both Jekyll and Hyde, the insecure underdog and the arrogant, controlling skirt chaser.
He had a hand in essentially every aspect of production on his films. In fact, he started calling himself the total filmmaker. He even wrote a book by that name. He was the total filmmaker. He made the decisions. He looked at everything. He didn't care about everything.
He really was a brilliant physical performer, and his movies almost all have some inspired comic bits. But they're also sloppy. The plots are flimsy, the lighting is impossible, and Jerry insists on wearing his giant gold pinky ring no matter what kind of character he's playing. And so while Jerry saw himself as a great artist, and film critics in France agreed with him, his countrymen, not so much.
Jerry was really dismissed by American critics as children's entertainment and vulgar and stupid and infantile and badly made. It was antagonistic and Jerry was a thin-skinned man. He read all the reviews and he always compared his critics to Nazis.
Still, in the early 1960s, he was turning out hit after hit. He really was the king of comedy. Until the culture started to pass him by. If you were 12 in 1963 when The Nutty Professor came out, you were 16 in 1967 when he's still making comedies of that sort. And you're listening to The Doors. You're not interested in a guy doing pratfalls and squealing. Ha ha ha!
And Jerry insisted that he was right to keep playing to that audience, but nobody was there any longer. And there was a lot of bitterness attached to that. Doing one of those pratfalls, he hurt his neck so badly, he developed an addiction to painkillers. And worse, his movies started to lose money.
By the early 70s, he hadn't had a mainstream hit in five or six years. There wasn't a person in America who thought that Jerry Lewis was an important director in 1972 other than Jerry Lewis. And this is when he decided to take the biggest risk of his career. He decided to make The Day the Clown Cried.
The idea came from Joan O'Brien. Chuck Denton knew the screenwriter Joan O'Brien when he was a kid. Joan had, after the war in the early 50s, had visited Germany and Austria. And in her European travels, she had learned that, you know, a huge percentage of the Jews that died in the Holocaust were children. She made her way to Hollywood, where she worked as a press agent for a clown named Emmett Kelly.
Kelly was famous for creating a hobo clown character named Weary Willie, unshaven, with a sad white frown painted over his mouth and a red nose. In character, he never spoke. But one day, he said something to Joan, which sparked her imagination. Which was, in a world without children, a clown's life would be a living hell. With her memories from post-war Europe still fresh, Joan came up with the idea for a movie about a circus clown who meets Jewish children in a concentration camp.
She brought this idea to Chuck's father, Charles Denton. He was a newspaper man on the Hollywood beat. But like Joan, what he really wanted to do was write for the movies. I mean, these are two people who, you know, lived through the war. And I remember my father repeating this idea that, you know, if we don't pay close attention to our transgressions, we surely will repeat them. I think that was kind of the impetus for it.
So Joan and Charles got to work drafting a screenplay they called The Day the Clown Cried. It's September 1938 in Berlin. The Nazis are in power, but Germany isn't at war just yet. Our hero, or really anti-hero, is a third-rate circus clown, selfish and vain, named Carl Schmitt. He's not a good clown, and he's not a good person.
After Carl is fired from the circus, he gets drunk and makes fun of Hitler in public, which gets him sent to a concentration camp as a political prisoner. He isn't Jewish. For three years in this camp, Carl claims to his fellow inmates to have been one of the great clowns of Europe, but he refuses to actually perform for them. Then one day, a group of Jewish children arrive at the camp. They're separated by a fence from the non-Jewish prisoners like Carl. He, I think, gets pushed or falls in the mud
and the other political prisoners are laughing at him, but the children are laughing and he thinks they may be laughing with him. That sort of sparks in him this desire to entertain them. So Carl starts putting on little shows at the fence. The guards tell him to stop, and when he does it anyway, they beat him to a pulp and shoot one of his friends. But then they see a way to use the clown to their advantage.
They promise him his freedom if he will keep the children calm while they wait in a boxcar bound for Auschwitz. He agrees, but then accidentally gets locked in when the train departs. Once they get to Auschwitz, the commandant ups the stakes. He will let the clown live if he accompanies the children on their way to the gas chamber. And he does it. Like the Pied Piper in Grease Paint, he leads them single file to their deaths.
Only, in the end, he finds he can't leave them behind. The last little girl takes him by the hand. He smiles sadly and goes in after her. The door slams shut behind them. The final scene is described as follows: Close shot. Carl. His face is pressed against a steel door. He fights the panic within him. Then he quickly wipes his eyes and turns back towards the children.
Slowly, he takes three chunks of stale bread from his coat pocket and begins juggling them, at the same time waggling his head from side to side. From deep inside him comes a tiny, tiny laugh. Suddenly, Carl tosses the pieces of bread high, high into the air and stretches out his arms to encompass all of the children. As they gather around him, they take up his soft laugh.
Timidly at first, then more assuredly until the chamber resounds with gentle laughter. Fade out. The end. Just to underscore it, at the end of the movie, as written, the clown and the children are inside the gas chamber, filling it with their laughter. Presumably when the screen goes black, they all die. It's bleak.
Despite this challenging material, when Joan O'Brien and Charles Denton started shopping their script around, they got the attention of some major stars. Richard Burton, Anthony Quinn, Dick Van Dyke, Milton Berle, and even Bobby Darin all reportedly considered taking on the lead role. But nothing ever materialized. And then, along came Jerry Lewis. The script came to me ten years ago. Ten years ago, I fell in love with this idea.
And in ten years, I'm happy that I have learned what I think is enough to go forward with this production. So a past-his-prime comedian who had never made a serious film was going to direct and star in a Holocaust drama. When he gave that interview during pre-production, Jerry couldn't have known what chaos was in store, but he must have known that it wouldn't be easy. Because what he was trying to do had never really been done before by anyone.
Remember, in 1972, there were barely any depictions of the Holocaust in American popular culture. Jerry's biographer, Sean Levy. There was no Schindler's List. There was no sort of foundational piece that said, "Okay, here is where conversation in American cinema about the Holocaust begins."
So it was crazy to even think that you would approach the Holocaust as a subject matter, let alone Jerry Lewis. It's a large crapshoot, what I call a crapshoot, a gamble. I've been very fortunate, though. The public has been very good to me. I think that they will accept this if it's real. And to date it is. We'll see. When we come back, Jerry rolls the dice. And he comes up with Snake Eyes. Snake Eyes
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When Jerry Lewis decided to make The Day the Clown Cried, he was signing on to what could have been a groundbreaking project. There had been plenty of Hollywood movies about World War II, starting while the war was still being fought. But there had been almost none that depicted the Nazis' so-called final solution. It was very explicitly done on the part of the studios not to foreground the Nazi persecution of the Jews.
Henry Gonshak is a retired English professor and the author of a book called Hollywood and the Holocaust. The studio heads in Hollywood at the time were all Jews. Harry Cohen, Willie Mayer, Adolf Zucker, but they were immigrant Jews, very assimilated and very much wanted to be seen as real Americans. And they were afraid that
that if there was too much emphasis placed in their films on the Jews, that that would inspire an anti-Semitic backlash in America, which was a reasonable assumption. It was a very anti-Semitic
anti-Semitic country at that time. So there were war pictures, espionage thrillers, movies set in POW camps, and yes, even comedies with Nazi villains, like Ernst Lubitsch's To Be or Not to Be. You know, you're quite famous in London, Colonel. They call you Concentration Camp Erhard. Yes, yes. We do the concentrating and the Poles do the camping. What was still much more unusual was for Hollywood to confront the full extent of the horrors the Nazis had wrought.
One of the first attempts was "The Diary of Anne Frank," which started as a Broadway play and became a movie in 1959. I want to write, but more than that, I want to bring out all kinds of things that lie buried deep in my heart. The play was enormously popular, and so was the film, but that never shows the camps. It ends with the Frank family being arrested in their secret annex in Amsterdam.
The 1961 courtroom drama "Judgment at Nuremberg" was more direct, featuring several minutes of real documentary footage taken by Allied soldiers after the liberation of Buchenwald and Dachau. A couple years after that, there were a few brief flashbacks in a movie called "The Pawnbroker." But otherwise, when Jerry Lewis set out to make "The Day the Clown Cried," the Nazi death camps had never been recreated on screen for an American narrative film.
And Lewis, who was Jewish — he was born Jerome Levitch — wanted to change that, as he told biographer Sean Levy: He said to me, "I don't care if this movie makes any money so long as everyone who never heard there was such a thing as a Holocaust sees it." That was the passion behind it. Whatever Jerry's loftier ambitions, after several years of flops, what was also immediately at stake was his career.
He had a lot to prove. So, I think also he thought this has a serious subject, they can't dismiss it as the Three Stooges, it's something real and true and powerful, I am going to make a work of art. It's terribly important to me and I am in a very vulnerable position. I feel somewhat like the mother prior to giving birth to the child, praying for its well-being.
Jerry dove into the project like a total filmmaker would. He and his production designer visited Auschwitz, Bergen-Belsen, and Dachau for inspiration. He lost 35 pounds on a grapefruit diet. He even hired a former SS officer as a technical consultant, a man who admitted it had been his job to pull the lever to release the gas. Jerry also rewrote the script.
Though the original screenplay already spoke to some of his favorite themes, casting his critics as literal Nazis and himself as the champion of innocent kids,
Jerry made some telling changes. For example, he changed the main character's name from Carl Schmitt, ordinary, not funny, to Helmut Dork, D-O-O-R-K. And he gave Helmut real talent. Instead of a pompous hack with delusions of greatness, Helmut is a great clown who used to be adored by audiences but has now fallen out of favor, not unlike Jerry Lewis himself.
As he says to his perfect doormat wife, a character also invented by Jerry, "I can't handle the pain of being a has-been!" With "has-been" in all caps. But the broad outlines of the story remained the same. A sad clown gets his groove back thanks to the love of some sweet, doomed, and mostly undifferentiated Jewish children. Filming began in Paris in March 1972, then moved to Stockholm, where the concentration camp sets had been constructed.
But, in Stockholm, everything began to come apart. The trouble started with the movie's producer, a Belgian named Nat Waksberger. Waksberger never showed up to set, and it quickly became clear he had not raised the money he claimed he had. The cast and crew started getting rubber checks, or not being paid at all. So to keep the movie alive, Lewis began paying them out of his own pocket.
By Jerry's own account, he spent almost a million dollars of his own money on this. But it wasn't enough. The Swedish studio where they were filming said it was owed hundreds of thousands more. So having shot most of the movie, but not all, Jerry took drastic measures. He basically escaped in the night with a copy of the footage.
The Swedish studio kept the original negative, but Jerry had a duplicate of the negative. Back in the United States, he started editing the movie and talking about it. Here he is on The Dick Cavett Show. The Day the Clown Cried will be finished. I hopefully will finish cutting it the next six or seven weeks. And we've been invited to the Cannes Film Festival, so I think we will open it then in May. Then it'll be released in America.
This was optimistic, to say the least. When he returned to the States, he discovered not only had Nat Waksberger run out of money, his option on the material had expired prior to production beginning. In other words, the whole time Jerry had been filming The Day the Clown Cried, he had never had the rights to the story.
When he found this out, he went to the screenwriters, Joan O'Brien and Charles Denton, hat in hand. I think they were kind of shocked at first that somebody would do this, basically steal the script. Still, Chuck Denton told me, after 15 years, his father and Joan were eager to see the movie made, even under these fishy circumstances. But then Lewis showed them some of what he had filmed. And they thought it was just terrible.
Just a disaster. And I think it was heartbreaking. What did they think was terrible about it? You know, he had turned it into something that was more...
I think, that, you know, he was really a great clown and, you know, he was this heroic figure. And that's not the script that they wrote. Like all Jerry Lewis movies, it was precise in some ways, sloppy in others. For example, how he had cast and costumed the Jewish children in the camp. The kids were all Scandinavian, you know, little blonde-haired kids dressed
And they've got new clothes and their hair's all done. And, you know, it's just, I don't know what he was thinking. Jerry confessed to the writers that he knew the movie had problems. Lewis kind of broke down.
and said, "I know, I know, I know," and talked about being addicted to Percodan and, you know, "I can make it better. I can fix it." And I think he wanted them to either put up some money or agree to defer any payment while he tried to, quote, "fix it." And they said no. Without the writer's sign-off, Jerry had no legal right to continue.
For a long time, he kept on hoping he could somehow finish the movie. "One way or another, I'll get it done," he wrote in 1982. The picture must be seen. But the writers were not the only obstacle. He would also need his original negatives back. "Hey, I hope in my lifetime we get the right to pull it out of Sweden. That's been the hang-up."
Over time, that hope curdled into something else. He lost his shit when I asked him about it. Sean Levy interviewed Jerry in the early 90s for his biography, The King of Comedy. Red in the face, he'd been drinking beer, it's about 11 in the morning, and screaming and yelling at me, profanity, personal accusations. He grabbed Sean's tape recorder and threw him off his yacht. When you walk...
through a storm keep your head as the decades passed jerry's public image evolved he represents the flame out of that generation of post-war american showbiz titans who couldn't understand why if they were doing the thing that made them successful they were no longer successful
He only directed two more movies after The Day the Clown Cried. One was about a clown who can't find work, the other about a man who fails over and over again to kill himself. They were both flops. So Jerry started to become better known for his annual telethon to benefit the Muscular Dystrophy Association, a 21-and-a-half-hour parade of aging stars and novelty acts. Though your dreams be tossed and blown
The telethons raised millions of dollars, but they were also mocked for being tacky and saccharine. Meanwhile, in interviews, Jerry was often angry, profane, and grandiose. I'm a multifaceted, talented, wealthy, internationally famous genius, he said. People don't like that. You will never...
And so as Jerry became a popular punching bag, just the notion of the day the clown cried began to seem increasingly outlandish. This overgrown man-child and self-proclaimed egomaniac made a movie about a circus clown at Auschwitz? Could it be in anything but world historical bad taste? So toxic it had to be locked away forever.
This was the thrust of a 1992 story in Spy magazine called Jerry Goes to Death Camp that cemented the film's reputation as, quote, the most notorious cinematic miscue in history. The piece features interviews with a handful of people who claim to have actually seen The Day the Clown Cried, or parts of it, including the comedian Harry Shearer, who had been friends in the 70s with one of Jerry's sons.
I think it's worse than you would be led to believe just by the force of your own imagination. Shearer has continued to talk about this over the years. Here he is in 2016. I just remember the overall feeling of it, which was it couldn't be more wrong. Rumor had it that Jerry Lewis kept the only extant print of the movie on his person at all times in a bulletproof metal briefcase.
But the screenplay started to circulate underground like contraband. One copy eventually found its way to a young comedian named Patton Oswalt. I just read it for pure pleasure and fascination. He was awed by the wrongness of what Jerry had done. He adds that ridiculous, nutty professor, cartoonish reality comedy to it.
At one point, his character gets up, it's very cold, and he goes to use the urinal, and you hear ice, like he's peeing ice or something, like he's adding comedy bits in the middle of a guy who's in Auschwitz.
The script gave Patton an idea. This is just pre-internet where we weren't used to the idea of, oh, everything is going to be available forever. So there was this feeling of, well, this is never going to be seen unless we do something about it. So I started staging these readings. Patton cut the screenplay down, cast a few of his friends, and staged The Day the Clown Cried live at an L.A. comedy club in 1996.
The first performances were by invitation only, but they couldn't keep a lid on it for long. "The word spread. It was kind of amazing." The show became a cult comedy hit, starring a rotating who's who of up-and-coming comedians.
Stephen Colbert, Bob Odenkirk, Ike Barinholtz, Will Arnett, Jack Black. Andy Preboy wrote a theme song for us. It's been panned, it's been booed, it's been banned and PU'd. It's a script that's really rotten that be better off their button that Patton's putting on with pride. Tonight's the night, the day the clown cried.
It evokes one of the best versions of laughter you can get, which is the laughter of disbelief. So here were Patton Oswalt and friends presenting The Day the Clown Cried as something so transparently terrible you could only laugh at it. And yet...
Just a couple of years later, a movie arrived in theaters that would get good reviews, make money at the box office, and eventually win three Oscars for a story about clowning around in a concentration camp. Is it possible Jerry Lewis was just 25 years too early? After the break.
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At the 1999 Academy Awards, the Oscar for Best Picture went to Shakespeare in Love. But the most memorable winner that night was a compact, wiry Italian named... Roberto! Roberto!
Roberto Benigni's reaction to his win for Best Foreign Language Film instantly entered Oscar's history when he climbed onto the back of his seat, climbed over the two seats in front of him to stand on top of Steven Spielberg, then jumped down, ran down the aisle, and hopped up each step to the stage. Thank you, thank you. This is a moment...
The movie for which he won this award, and later that night Best Actor, was Life is Beautiful. In a story that proves love, family, and imagination conquer all.
Benigni plays Guido, a Jewish waiter turned bookseller, who is sent to a concentration camp with his four-year-old son, where he shields the boy from the horrors around him by convincing him it's all just a game. But if you win, you get the first prize. What prize? The first prize, I told you.
In the end, Guido dies, but his son survives. And it's implied that Guido's improv skills have not only saved his son's life, but preserved his innocence and humanity, his belief that, yes, life is beautiful.
So, some 25 years after Jerry Lewis tried to make The Day the Clown Cried, here was another actor, known for his childlike persona and elastic physical comedy, writing, directing, and starring in a drama about a clown-like figure in a Nazi concentration camp. But instead of being mocked, instead of being dismissed out of hand for hubris and bad taste, the Nini was celebrated. So what gives?
Well, first of all, Life is Beautiful had the benefit of actually being released. Who knows how audiences would have responded to The Day the Clown Cried if they'd actually been able to see it. Certainly by 1999, the movie-going public was more accustomed to stories like this, with the death camps no longer a cinematic third rail. But most importantly, I think what made audiences love Life is Beautiful is that, weirdly, it's a feel-good movie. The ending is sad, but joyful, too.
The movie says that even in the most horrific circumstances, humanity can be creative and loving. These are soothing, consoling messages for the audience, but they're also messages that falsify these very black truths that you get from the Holocaust.
Henry Gonshak, author of Hollywood and the Holocaust, is not a fan of this movie. The theme of that film is that the bond between a father and a child can never be broken, even by the Nazis, even by camps. But the whole point of the camp...
was to destroy human ties, you know, to dehumanize the prisoners and to pit them against one another. All of that is falsified if you say that the bond between a father and a son can't be broken.
Life is Beautiful was hardly the first movie to sentimentalize the Holocaust. In fact, this has long been the Hollywood way. To give the famous example in The Diary of Anne Frank, what they did was they took out of context one line from Anne Frank's diary, and the line is, In spite of everything, I still believe that people are really good at heart. And that is the way both the play and the film end.
If everyone is good at heart, I mean, the Holocaust couldn't have occurred. But that's a soothing message for the audience. Commercial filmmakers who want to tackle this subject have always had to strike an uneasy balance. If you want to educate as many people as possible about what happened, well, as the song goes, a spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down. This was true even for Steven Spielberg when he directed Schindler's List, without a doubt the most successful Holocaust film ever made.
There are depictions of the Holocaust in that film that are as horrific and as historically accurate as I think in just about any other movie. But on the other hand, Spielberg, who's very savvy about his audience, knew that if he just presented the Holocaust with unadulterated horror, with nothing affirmative, he would never reach a mass audience. So he gave them something affirmative.
There's that powerful scene at the end where you see all the real people who live to old age because Schindler saved them, the Jews. So the question is, you know, how much do you soften it before you fundamentally distort it? Look, obviously there were Jews who survived the Holocaust. Otherwise, I wouldn't exist. And I can understand both the commercial imperative and the human impulse to find something affirmative or meaningful in the ashes.
But on the other hand, 6 million Jews were murdered, along with 5 million Roma, homosexuals, disabled people, and other undesirables. And there is no upside. No catharsis. They died. And they died for nothing. I just don't know if anyone really wants to see that movie.
The release of Schindler's List in 1993 kicked off what one critic called a Holocaust boom, which included Life is Beautiful and many more films besides, on the big screen and small. They're so common now they have subgenres. The Holocaust sports movie, the Holocaust revenge thriller, the Holocaust courtroom drama, the Holocaust love story. Some of them are better than others, but by and large, these movies play by the rules of Hollywood storytelling.
There is a central character who goes on a journey, faces challenges, and is transformed by the experience. So if The Day the Clown Cried had been made today, it seems like it would fit right in. On the surface, it's a sentimental story of personal redemption for Helmut Dork, a selfish man who is transformed by the love of children, and nobly sacrifices himself so that those children won't have to face their final moments alone.
Certainly Jerry saw it that way. Here's how he described the story at the time. You will see wonderful things happen to a human being because some things happen that make him think about others besides himself. And that's all I'm going to tell you. That may have been the movie he wanted to make, but that's not how it comes across on the page.
Even after Jerry's rewrites, I think Helmut is insufferably self-absorbed, basically from beginning to end. And I don't think he fundamentally changes. He only learns to care about others because they like his act. And don't forget, the ending is incredibly grim. Unlike Guido in Life is Beautiful, Helmut's sacrifice doesn't save anybody. The kids all die. And why does he decide to die with them? It's ambiguous.
Maybe he wants to offer them some comfort. Maybe he can't live with the survivor's guilt. Maybe he decides life isn't worth living without an audience. Not so sentimental, if you ask me. And in fact, when I finally spoke to someone who has actually seen The Day the Clown Cried...
He told me the film is remarkable precisely because Jerry rejected sentimentality. My opinion, this is only my opinion, is that at this moment he knows very well what he's doing and he wants not to be nice with nobody. And nobody includes the audience. Jean-Michel Frodon is a film critic and historian who writes for the French version of Slate.
And he told me, in his very French way, that The Day the Clown Cried is an important film because it refuses to make the Holocaust palatable. To me, this is a film you cannot watch peacefully. It's disturbing. And this is one of the reasons it was attacked later on, that it was not nice to look at the film. Of course it's not nice.
Talking about death camps as nice is for me something unacceptable. It's a suffering film, and to a certain extent, it's a film that makes you suffer. I have to confess, despite everything I had heard and read about how terrible this movie is, part of me wanted Jean-Michel to be right. There is so much Holocaust fiction out there. Some of the story and character beats are so familiar that I have found myself becoming almost numb to it.
But ever since I first heard about The Day the Clown Cried, years ago, just the image in my head of that grotesque final sequence, it has haunted me. It got under my skin, which I think a depiction of genocide probably should do. So I went into this project halfway hoping that The Day the Clown Cried might have the power to shock, or at the very least surprise, in a way that few modern Holocaust movies do.
And now that's exactly what Jean-Michel Fredon was telling me, and he had seen the movie. He told me it was shown to him by a French film director who had gotten it from his father, who had been friends with Jerry. He not only showed it to me, but he gave it to me. Oh, so do you still have it? Of course. In what format? Well, now it's on a DVD. Is that something you could share with me? No. Jerry Lewis himself.
would have told me the same thing. Are we going to ever going to get to see The Day the Clown Cried? No. No. After decades of blaming others for the movie's failure to launch, near the end of his life, Jerry changed his story. Now it was he who did not want The Day the Clown Cried to be seen. And it had been his decision all along to scrap it. Not the screenwriters, the producer, or anyone else. I was embarrassed. I was ashamed of the work done.
And I was grateful that I had the power to contain it all and never let anybody see it. It was bad, bad, bad. It could have been wonderful. But I slipped up. I didn't quite get it. But despite Jerry's wishes, the day the clown cried has not been entirely containable.
He did his best. In 2014, when he donated his archives to the Library of Congress, he put in a stipulation that any material relating to the day the clown cried had to be kept unavailable to the public for 10 years. So 10 years came and went, but when the prohibition was finally lifted last summer, the archive turned out to be a red herring. The movie wasn't in there. All they had was a few hours of unsynced, unedited dailies from just a couple of scenes.
But there was a real treasure trove. It just turned out to be in Sweden. So this is where you've been hiding? It's him! It is! It is! Footage from the film reels Jerry left behind in Stockholm in 1972 have now reappeared in a documentary called From Darkness to Light, which aired in December on Turner Classic Movies. Again, it's your funeral. Are funerals usually in order when someone dies?
It's not the same thing as actually seeing the movie. It's mostly talking head interviews with only selected scenes sprinkled in. But I'm not going to lie, seeing this footage did scratch a certain itch. Come back, damn you! Come back and listen! Listen to the children laughing! Mostly, it confirmed what I had already suspected. The Day the Clown Cried is probably not a good movie. But it is a fascinating character study. The character being Jerry Lewis himself.
For example, consider this early scene with Helmut and his wife.
And he just took the last bit I had away from me because of a stupid accident. But he can't take your talent away. That's what makes you strong. The writing is clunky, the mix of accents bizarre, but to me it's riveting. It's like watching Jerry give himself a pep talk about his own declining career. What the hell are you talking about? What talent? You mean the talent I had? That's gone.
I am now nothing but a prop to be used and reused. You call that strong? How do I rise above that? By not quitting. You've got to fight. You've got to fight because you're an artist, a human being. Jerry's performance can be hammy, but also genuinely affecting, especially towards the end. Now, we want you to lead the children quietly to it, to that building over there. Oh, God, not the children. It isn't like killing the enemy in battle.
"Pamo humane!" "Enemy? Humane? They're babies! They're just babies! Why?" Here he is, about to lead the children to their deaths, lying to them for the last time. "What's wrong now, Helmut? Where are we going this time?" "We're just going to another building, that's all. Where we'll have more room to play, see? Now, I would like you all to line up behind me, okay?"
In the final, wordless moments of the movie, Helmut Dork appears to finally accept the truth about himself. His talent, or lack thereof, doesn't matter at all. He is small and powerless. He could live to clown another day, or he can choose to end his life bathed in the love of his last adoring fans. Watching this play out on Jerry's face and in his body, the ending feels perversely aspirational.
Because Jerry himself struggled to accept his own decline, his own inevitable smallness. And so he responded by making a fiction in which his alter ego both accepts his fate and remains a hero to the bitter, bitter end. A hero specifically to children, the only ones Jerry felt truly understood and appreciated him. In sum, The Day the Clown Cried is a breathtaking act of narcissism.
Jerry used the largest mass murder of the 20th century to work through his own neuroses about comedy and fame. He found a way to make the Holocaust all about him. Jerry Lewis died in 2017 at the age of 91. But the legend of the day the clown cried lives on. I wrote about Jerry almost 30 years ago. People still, such as yourself, are fascinated by this movie, ask me about it regularly.
This fascination with Jerry's Waterloo is ironically an important part of his cultural footprint, which, as Sean Levy told me, is otherwise shrinking by the day. I'm probably at 62, one of the last generations who grew up with him as a cultural constant.
So my children would only know about Jerry Lewis because their dad wrote a book about him, and their children will never know who he is. He's kind of vanished. The list of comedians and filmmakers he influenced is long, but his own movies have not held up very well. And it's unlikely anybody's rushing to reassess and defend his work, seeing as after his death, multiple actresses came forward to say that he had sexually harassed them, and worse.
So without much cultural memory of cross-eyed crazy Jerry, or even Vegas telethon Jerry, and with precious little goodwill towards the real Jerry, it's the day the clown cried that keeps him almost relevant. And I suspect it's much more powerful to imagine the day the clown cried than it would be to actually see it. You know, I think if people could see it all this time, we wouldn't be chatting today.
The mystery is essential to keeping the legend alive, and by extension, Jerry. I almost wonder if that was intentional on his part. Sure worked on me. Perhaps in the strangest twist of all, it's still possible we'll see a new version of The Day the Clown Cried, based on the original screenplay by Joan O'Brien and Charles Denton, which is still somehow kicking around Hollywood almost 70 years after it was written.
The producer, who now owns the rights, told the industry website Deadline last summer, quote, this is an important movie that needs to get made. And I think with everything that's going on in the world today, now more than ever is the time to make a movie like this. I'll believe it when I see it. It seems to me I've heard that song before.
This is Dakota Ring. I'm Max Friedman. And I'm Willa Paskin. If you're a Slate Plus member or ready to become one, please stick around and listen to a conversation Max and I had about the state of contemporary Holocaust fiction, which is booming. This to me is the question. It's like, why this? Why now? Like five or six Holocaust or Holocaust-adjacent TV shows kind of all at the same time.
If you want to hear more, you can sign up for Slate Plus. If you aren't already a member, you can subscribe now on Apple Podcasts by clicking Try Free at the top of the Decoder Ring show page. Or visit slate.com slash decoder plus to get access wherever you listen.
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This episode of Decoder Ring was reported, written, and produced by Max Friedman and edited by me. Decoder Ring is produced by me, Max, and Katie Shepard. Evan Chung is our supervising producer. Merritt Jacob is our technical director.
Special thanks to Judy Berman, Bruce Handy, Benjamin Charles Germain Lee, Kaylee Thompson, Lizzie O'Leary, and Derek John. If you have any cultural mysteries you want us to decode, please email us at DecoderRing at Slate.com. And you can also call us now on our Decoder Ring hotline. That number is 347-460-7281. We'd love to hear from you. Otherwise, we'll see you in two weeks. ♪
I'm Leon Nafok, and I'm the host of Slow Burn, Watergate. Before I started working on this show, everything I knew about Watergate came from the movie All the President's Men. Do you remember how it ends? Woodward and Bernstein are sitting at their typewriters, clacking away. And then there's this rapid montage of newspaper stories about campaign aides and White House officials getting convicted of crimes, about audio tapes coming out that prove Nixon's involvement in the cover-up. The last story we see is Nixon resigns. It takes a little over a minute in the movie.
In real life, it took about two years. Five men were arrested early Saturday while trying to install eavesdropping equipment. It's known as the Watergate incident. What was it like to experience those two years in real time? What were people thinking and feeling as the break-in at Democratic Party headquarters went from a weird little caper to a constitutional crisis that brought down the president?
The downfall of Richard Nixon was stranger, wilder, and more exciting than you can imagine. Over the course of eight episodes, this show is going to capture what it was like to live through the greatest political scandal of the 20th century. With today's headlines once again full of corruption, collusion, and dirty tricks, it's time for another look at the gate that started it all. Subscribe to Slow Burn now, wherever you get your podcasts.