Jerry Lewis' Clown of Auschwitz

[DavidM]

You have to wonder why a move script about a washed-up clown named Helmut Doork and his travails in National Socialist concentration camps was ever written. Doork is arrested for making a joke about Der Fuehrer and sent to a prison camp. There he annoys the Nazi guards by entertaining Jewish children. But he is saved when the Nazis realize that he could be used to lead the children into the trains bound for the gas chambers. Doork accepts and carries out his task but without recognition of what he is doing. In the last scene, the children hang onto the clown and ask him, “Where are we going, Helmut?” All together, singing and laughing, they enter a gas chamber. The doors close.

The script was entitled The Day the Clown Cried. Written in 1962 by an American and a Brit, the script was bought and traded and finally caught the attention of US comedian Jerry Lewis. Lewis identified with Doork and had wanted to produce a "meaningful" movie. In 1972 Lewis teamed up with producer Nathan Wachsberger and started filming in Stockholm. But the team soon fell apart. Lewis carried on funding the production and played the part of Doork himself but then got in another dispute with the scriptwriters.

Lewis had hoped to create a masterpiece but what was created was one of the most ridiculous films ever produced, up there with Plan 9 From Outer Space. The scene of Lewis catching his nose on the barbwire while trying to look through a fence epitomizes the film.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p03f8msk/p03f8rzl

The most accurate information about The Day the Clown Cried can be seen on-line at
at https://lostmediaarchive.fandom.com/wik ... _Year_2024

The Day the Clown Cried was never release yet is experiencing a wave of interest. Supposedly, the only copy of the film was given to the National Archives by Lewis and is to have its first public showing this year. Articles have appeared on Wikipedia, on-line, and in several publications. But critics are torn between the customary heaping of paeans of praise upon "Holocaust Films" and the abysmal ridiculousness of Clown.

Another movie about innocent children at Auschwitz, The Boy in the Striped Pajamas is as absurd as Clown (A young German boy makes friends with young Jewish boy while hanging out at the electrified fence around Auschwitz, digs a tunnel into the camp to visit him and they both go to the "shower" together). But it was slickly produced by BBC among other producers. So slickly produced that Holocaust Believers started worrying...
As Michael Gray asked in the June 3, 2015 of Holocaust Studies,"The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas (sic): A Blessing or Curse for Holocaust Education. Now the following warning has been attached to articles on Pajamas,

Many people who have read the book or watched the film adaptation believe that it is a true story based on real people and real events. However, it is important to understand that the book is a work of fiction. The events portrayed could never have happened.

A similar floundering seems to be affecting the National Archives delayed release of Clown... the release of an absurd piece of obvious Holocaust fiction being weighted against widespread interest in a film with a major performance by Jerry Lewis.

Holocaust Believers have struggled with the corrosive effects of obviously fake stories about "Death Camps" since they might erode faith in the canonical stories about Death Camps... An increasingly cynical population and the beneficial effects of Revisionism are making the promoters of Holocaust Belief nervous.

[Callafangers]

Interesting post. I am wondering if Lewis had, in his mind, envisioned this film as an attention-grabber (if nothing else), failing to realize until after making it that producing a total mockery of the Holocaust narrative probably wouldn't be the best way to promote it's sanctity... hence the non-release.