The Day the Clown Cried

 
I vaguely remember the Jerry Lewis Theaters. It was going to be a chain of movie theaters devoted to showing family films in the early '70's. I guess they were trying to get small investors---a proto-crowd source thing---and my mother may have momentarily considered it. I was about eight and thought it sounded great. I thought it meant we could produce our own movies and have them shown.

The business was doomed to failure in part because they didn't make family films in those days. The first movie they showed in one of those theaters was a western--I don't remember which one--in which John Wayne uses the term "son of a bitch".

Harry Shearer, one of the few people to have seen Jerry Lewis's Holocaust movie, The Day the Clown Cried, had theorized that he made the movie to be shown in his new theater chain. That didn't seem very likely. Pretty much any of his movies could have been shown there. Why do something radically different?

Shearer seems to have changed his view. He said something about it more recently. He noted that Lewis was teaching at USC, he had his book immodestly titled The Total Filmmaker, the French revered him. He wanted to make a movie to reflect his newfound gravitas.

Perhaps not surprisingly, the movie didn't turn out well and it was locked away.

Lewis refused to talk about it for years. He finally answered a question somewhere. He said, no, you'll never see it because it was "bad, bad, bad". He thought it could have been "wonderful", but he had failed because he didn't know why he was doing it.

It seemed to have wrecked his career. If you look on imdb.com, he had been working constantly directing movies and TV episodes. He said he was thankful that he had the power to hide The Day the Clown Cried from the world, but it was eight years before he directed another movie, and then it was Hardly Working which was a disaster. He started filming and had to stop immediately because they guy who said he was providing the money for it didn't have any. They finally got it going again.

I only had couple of glimpses of Hardly Working. I drove past a drive-in theater and saw Jerry Lewis on the screen in yellowface working in a Japanese restaurant. Made Mickey Rooney in Breakfast at Tiffany's seem rather sensitive by comparison.

The second thing I saw of it was when I went to a friend's apartment. He had HBO. We turned on the TV and there was Jerry Lewis dressed a clown delivering mail for the Post Office. He was walking along looking depressed, just delivering the mail, but a large crowd was following him apparently thinking it was incredibly funny.

It was just awful. And to think that The Day the Clown Cried was even worse.

The movie was handed over the Library of Congress with the provision that it not be screened for ten years. However, since they never got to rights to the book, they won't be able to show it even after that, I suppose until the copyright on the book expires.