For years I had heard about Lewis' unreleased project; recently I got to read a copy of the script (thanks to "Subterranian Cinema.") In a nutshell, Lewis' character (and he wrote it for himself) is the same as the clown in "Barely Working"...he teeters between childish slapstick and adult pathos. It does not help that he rechristened the clown "Helmut Dorque" (pronounced "dork"; I think he was called Schmidt it the novel.) The plot is similar to the movies he made with Dino; a faded German circus clown gets drunk in a bar and puts down Hitler; two Gestapo officers hear him and he is arrested. After an interrogation which tries to be comic, Dorque is sent to a politcal prisoner concentration camp for three to four years. In 1941 or 1942 the camp is expanded into a holding area for Jews, and Dorque performs for the Jewish children, who are mostly German. He builds a rapport with them, and later is accidentally sent to a death camp with them. There he is forced to clowishly march them into the camp's gas chamber...Dorque is not a Nazi, as others have written, rather he is an apolitical and self-centered man who only wants to be world-famous again, and the lust for performing is his downfall. What destroys the script is that Lewis tries to make a comedy, and all we really see is seething rage, rage that emanates from the downward spiral of Jerry's career. "Spy Magazine" got a hold of a rough cut of the film and showed it to members of the cast and Harry Shearer; all of them were embarrassed, Shearer called the film a " black velvet painting of Auschwitz from Tijuana...the sentiment is right, but the artistic medium is just horribly wrong" or words to that effect. Be thankful this never made it; otherwise those great telethons would have never happened.
Review of The Day the Clown Cried
