The French Film Critic Who Saw Jerry Lewiss Infamous Holocaust Movieand Loved It. Jerry Lewis died on Sunday at the age of 9. The Day the Clown Cried, an unreleased 1. Holocaust film that Lewis directed and starred in. It tells the story of a fictional German clown, Helmut Doork, who is sent to a Nazi concentration camp as a political prisoner and ends up entertaining Jewish children at an adjoining death camp. In the films climax, Helmut distracts the children with jokes and pratfalls as he leads them to the gas chambers, ultimately joining them inside. You will be only partially relieved to know that this was intended to be Lewiss first dramatic role. Lewis shot the film mainly in Sweden, but due to money troubles not enough and rights issues very tangled, as well as personal problems a Percodan addiction, The Day the Clown Cried was never completed. It exists only in a rough cut version that has never been publicly screened. The pictures rarity, its unlikely even ghastly subject matter, and the fact that it was made by the writer director star of The Nutty Professor and Hook, Line and Sinker, has made The Day the Clown Cried arguably the most notorious lost film in movie historya kind of Holy Grail for connoisseurs of presumed bad taste. Actors and comedians, notably Patton Oswalt, have produced staged readings of the films screenplay. In 2. 01. 6, 3. 0 minutes of footage from the film even leaked online. A year earlier, Lewis had donated his print of the film, along with the rest of his filmography, to the Library of Congresswith the proviso that The Day the Clown Cried not be screened until at least 2. So there is hope for some, at least, that the movie will eventually see the light of day. Twenty five years ago, I wrote a then definitive oral history of the making of The Day the Clown Criedfor Spy magazine, which included interviews with several people who had managed to see Lewiss print of the film, including the actor and writer Harry Shearer. I began work on an as yet uncompleted update of this history several years agobut in honor of Lewiss passing, I would like to present this previously unpublished interview with Jean Michel Frodon, who saw a print of The Day the Clown Cried in the early 2. Frodon, a former film critic for Le Monde and editor of Cahiers du Cinema, is Frenchand, perhaps needless to say, has a more positive view of the film than do its handful of American viewers. Vanity Fair So youve seen a rough cut of the film, some kind of work printJean Michel Frodon Yes, Ive seen what I supposeof course, it is not possible to be totally sureis the most complete version. It is not finished, obviously. Nevertheless, you can see what the film would have been. It tells the story from beginning to end in the proper order, and comparing it with the script, no major scene is missing. Of course there is some editing that could be done, and certainly sound work, and perhaps there are a few errors. But basically I can say I have seen the film. What circumstances did you see it under A French film director, Xavier Giannoli, happened to own this video of it and asked me to his office to see it. This was a long time ago. The Spy Who Loved Me details Bonds adventures in teaming up with Soviet agent Anya Amasova Barbara Bach against the menacing henchman Jaws Richard Kiel. This James Bond movie sports a labyrinthine story involving outerspace extortion. The leading lady is sexy Russian secret agent Barbara Bach, who joins forces with. Watch Full movie The Spy Who Loved Me 1977, Online Free. James Bond investigates the hijacking of British and Russian submarines carrying nuclear warheads. Parents please protect your kids from accessing porn by simply using your browsers surfing preferences. All models appearing on this site are 18 years or. Im not sure the exact date, but I would say around 2. At this point he asked me to keep it secret, which of course I did. LSLsw/x240-FmI.jpg' alt='The Spy Who Loved Me Full Movie' title='The Spy Who Loved Me Full Movie' />Until one day, he openly talked about having this print on a radio program. So I felt I had no longer to keep this secret. Frodon did not know how Giannoli got his print, and Giannoli himself did not respond to multiple requests for an interview. So what did you think Is The Day the Clown Cried any good Yes. Im convinced its a very good job. Its a very interesting and important film, very daring about both the issue, which of course is the Holocaust, but even beyond that as a story of a man who has dedicated his life to making people laugh and is questioning what it is to make people laugh. I think it is a very bitter film, and a disturbing film, and this is why it was so brutally dismissed by those people who saw it, or elements of it, including the writers of the script. Having read both the original script by Charles Denton and Joan OBrien and Jerry Lewiss rewrite, my fear for the film would be that it uses the Holocaust as a way to redeem this unhappy clown, that there is an inherent imbalance and sentimentality in that conceit. Hes not redeemed at all First hes suffering all the way through and then he dies. What kind of redemption is that Well, again, Im only going off the scripts. But Helmut starts off as this very cynical character and by the end, theres a line where he says something to the effect that he never had children, but now he does. Helping these children has given him purpose. He is walking into the gas chamber to die with the children he took care of. This is not what you can call redemption. Maybe it is a moral redemption, but for what Hes not guilty of much before, so he has nothing to redeem. Of course the film is connecting a genuine historical situation, and a dramatic one, with an individual situation, but for me this is a very meaningful way to do it. Tell me about the experience of watching the film. It feels to me that if the script were fully realized, especially the ending, it would be almost impossible to watch. I dont know why it would be impossible to watch. There are many things that are difficult to watch. This film finds what I consider a cinematic answer to some real, serious issues, using a kind of stylized setting, both in the costumes and the sets. Its not pretending to be realistic at all. Perception Season 2 Episode 13 Online more. Instead, it has a very obvious fairy tale feelingnot fairy tale, but tale. There are no fairies here, but there details like in the Grimm brothers, like this kind of stylized background with a train rolling along the countryside where the children are being kept, and afterwards, when Helmut leads them to the gas chambers like the Pied Piper. So the film uses an unrealistic way to relay events we know about, events that have been shown so many times in very realistic ways. In an essay, youve compared The Day the Clown Cried to Schindlers List, where most of the main characters surviveand you make the point that The Day the Clown Cried is more honest about the actual events on that point, since everyone we care about in Lewiss film dies. One of the shocking things to me about Schindlers List is that it was made to be as much of a crowd pleaser as possible, with several tricks, one of them being addressing the evocation of the slaughtering of 6 million persons through the survival of a few of them. This is for me a very clever maneuver. If The Day the Clown Cried had been finished and released in 1. Holocaust Off the top of my head, I cant think of any earlier ones. In at least that sense it might have been pioneering. It would depend on what you would call mainstream. There were several films about the Holocaust made in Eastern Europe in this time, which maybe doesnt entitle them to be called mainstream. The Garden of the Finzi Continis a 1. Italian film directed by Vittorio De Sica addresses the issue of the Holocaust, but it doesnt show the camps. Now that I think of it, there was also The Diary of Anne Frank in 1. But as you say with The Garden of Finzi Continis, it doesnt portray the camps themselves. There were films about survivors, too, like The Pawnbroker in 1. There had been many images of concentration camps, but mostly in documentaries, not in fictional films. What did you think of Jerry Lewiss performance in The Day the Clown CriedIts a very bizarre project. Hes not indulging himself, but he is self caricaturing. Hes depicting himself as a clown who is a very unsympathetic character, as a man, and who is losing his professional abilities and making mistakes on stage. He is very selfish and totally stupid, which drives him directly to the camps. And there he has a very sick expression on his face.