During the Holocaust, a man in a concentration camp attempts to distract a child from the horrors surrounding them through humor.
You probably clocked this logline as the plot of 1997’s “Life is Beautiful.” Directed by and starring Roberto Benigni, “Life is Beautiful” was one of the most lauded films of that awards season, winning the Grand Prix at the Cannes Film Festival and taking home three Academy Awards. However, this description also applies to a different film – one made roughly 20 years prior that is still the subject of mockery and mystique to this day: Jerry Lewis’ “The Day the Clown Cried.”
The Lewis film, which remains unfinished and unreleased, also takes place in a concentration camp and follows a German circus clown (played by Lewis), who is tasked with making Jewish children laugh before they’re marched into a gas chamber and killed. The film is one of Hollywood’s most storied, mythical failures, and is now the subject of a documentary called “From Darkness to Light,” playing at the Atlanta Jewish Film Festival.
If you know anything about the comedic stylings of Jerry Lewis, a picture of what this film is like probably immediately popped into your head. But, from the substantial bits of footage that “From Darkness to Light” provides, “The Day the Clown Cried” is nothing like you might expect.
The documentary offers insight into the making of the film, its financial and legal troubles, and why we will probably never see a full, final cut. The documentary can be a bit trite in its construction, often using talking heads from old films, like the 2016 documentary “The Last Laugh,” while also mixing in some fresher takes from the likes of figures like Martin Scorsese, who directed Lewis in “The King of Comedy.”
But the most fascinating aspect of “From Darkness to Light” is the footage from the film itself combined with an interview directors Eric Friedler and Michael Lurie did with Lewis before his death in 2017. These two things acting in tension with each other offer a fascinating look at the ways in which the feeling of failure manifests over time.
The beginning of the documentary is devoted to a number of filmmakers, comedians, and crew and cast members from “The Day the Clown Cried” talking about the evolution of comedy when it comes to darker subject matter.
Nowadays, that’s not a particularly strange combination. But in the late 1960s and early 1970s, finding humor in a situation as terrible as the Holocaust was a very tricky thing. “The Producers” had made “Springtime for Hitler” a hit in 1967, but making fun of Nazis was a little more acceptable – perhaps a little more abstract – than making a comedy (really, dramedy) set in a concentration camp. In this sense – and knowing what would happen with “Life is Beautiful” decades later – Lewis might have been a bit ahead of his time.
But, when you see clips from “The Day the Clown Cried,” the film feels incongruous with the way everyone talks about it. Namely, it’s not very funny at all. Actor and comedian Harry Shearer, one of the few people who has seen the film in its entirety, talks frankly in the documentary about how this, weirdly, is the movie’s biggest problem.
Whatever humor was meant to be in the film, it comes across as treacly and unspecific. Maybe, if the film were more akin to a true-blue Jerry Lewis comedy, it would have at least been reaching for something bold. But it doesn’t play to the filmmaker’s strengths at all.
There’s plenty of talk about what went on behind the scenes, from financial woes to backstabbing producers. But the best parts of “From Darkness to Light” are the moments where Lewis discusses how he perceives his own strengths and weaknesses.
One of the movie’s most fascinating stretches dissects how Lewis hired an actual former Nazi to be the film’s technical advisor. It seems like Lewis had a strong urge to make things feel as real as possible, as well as a desire to show the Nazi guards as human rather than evil automatons.
Your mileage on these artistic decisions may vary, but it’s hard to deny that they come into conflict with any sort of comedy the film may have. At least in the scenes we see, no one is really the butt of the joke – and it’s hard to find the joke in the first place.
For his part, Lewis seemed hugely embarrassed by the whole endeavor, all the way up until his death in 2017. The phrase “bad work” is a constant refrain in his interviews. The interviewer tries to steer Lewis toward a more specific reason for why he thinks “The Day the Clown Cried” didn’t work, but he struggles to really articulate a reason beyond him not being in the right headspace, and therefore not able to find comedy in the darkest circumstances imaginable.
The specter of “The Day the Clown Cried” truly seems to haunt Lewis, and there’s a tension between his seeming willingness to talk about the project and the lack of specificity he really gives as to what went wrong.
It’s a very melancholy experience, watching a man consider such a seismic failure in comparison with all his other achievements, particularly when others have been able to turn a similar idea into a success. When asked about “Life is Beautiful” toward the end of the documentary, Lewis has nothing but praise. “He’s a good comedian,” he says about Benigni – and that statement holds all the pain in the world.
