The Day The Clown Cried (1972)

For a lot of the most successful comic actors in history - names like Charlie Chaplin, Bill Cosby, Jim Carrey, Richard Pryor, Steve Martin and Woody Allen immediately come to mind - you simply cannot have a successful, thriving career in comedy without delving into your own personal deep, dark night of the soul.

Just look at Jerry Lewis: throughout his career he served as a litmus test for what was funny. You either loved his antics and clamored for more, or were thoroughly disenchanted by his childish goofing and clomping about. He certainly has his legions of fans and they will (and have) watched him in anything and everything. Yet even he felt that if he were to be taken seriously as an artist then he, too, would have to bite down on the double-edged razor blade known as drama.

Let's see now: after starting out and making himself the blueprint for second-bananaing with Dean Martin, Jerry has been a college professor, an astronaut, a magician, an army soldier, a Navy captain, an amateur cowboy, a juvenile delinquent, a bellboy, an errand boy, a patsy and an innocent guy thought to be someone else (which happened to him quite a lot). So after the release of 1970's Which Way To The Front?, it would only be natural to think that Jerry would want to explore new horizons. That is, become more than just a comic actor.

Already, warning klaxons should be going off. Anyone who has seen a Jerry Lewis film is already familiar with the term pathos. Right? Oh, very well:

Pathos (pronounced /ˈpeɪθɒs/ or /ˈpeɪθoʊs/; Greek: πάθος, for "suffering" or "experience;" adjectival form: 'pathetic' from παθητικός) represents an appeal to the audience's emotions. Pathos is a communication technique used most often in rhetoric (where it is considered one of the three modes of persuasion, alongside ethos and logos), and in literature, film and other narrative art.

Pathos is often associated with emotions, but it is more complex than simply emotions. A better equivalent might be appeal to the audience's sympathies and imagination. An appeal to pathos causes an audience not just to respond emotionally but to identify with the writer's point of view - to feel what the writer feels. In this sense, pathos evokes a meaning implicit in the verb 'to suffer' - to feel pain imaginatively. Perhaps the most common way of conveying a pathetic appeal is through narrative or story, which can turn the abstractions of logic into something palpable and present. The values, beliefs, and understandings of the writer are implicit in the story and conveyed imaginatively to the reader. Pathos thus refers to both the emotional and the imaginative impact of the message on an audience, the power with which the writer's message moves the audience to decision or action.

There's been a good amount of pathos in his later solo films, giving the viewer a little extra drama to go with their laughs, at no extra charge. Thing is, people who like drama don't necessarily want to see some wailing goof flail about. And people who love to laugh don't want a lot of maudlin drama. It's like riding a teeter-totter that decided which way it wants to tip by itself.

Off-topic a bit: remember a while back in one of my Is It Too Much To Ask?... posts when I requested the honor of holding onto one of Jerry's most closely-guarded pet projects? The Day The Clown Cried is the movie in question and has been embroiled in lawsuits, claims, counter-claims and double-secret probation from 1972 on through to today. Needless to say, Jer' has yet to contact me on that subject.

Also, aside from a select few (at Spy Magazine, for instance), nobody has seen this film because, due to lawyers and well-locked vaults, it is one of those projects that will never see the light of day - much less the projection room of your friendly neighborhood multiplex.

With this being the case, I guess there isn't much need in me going on with this, since there's no way I can review a movie I can't possibly see.

Unless...

That is...

I'd happen to have the shooting script for said film.

(looks down next to keyboard)


















Wellllll...lookie here.

Don't ask me; I just look for these things and there they are.

Seeing as how there's only the script to go by, we'll have to read through this, analyze each section and go from what it looks like was intended.

Ready to use your imaginations, kids?

We'll start with what I do know right off: The Plot: A once famous clown, Helmut (Lewis) is fired from a prestigious German circus. Getting drunk at a local bar, he drunkenly imitates Hitler in front of some Gestapo agents, who arrest and send him to a prison camp. Helmut angers his fellow prisoners by refusing to perform for them. As times passes, Jews are brought into the camp, with fraternizing between them and the other prisoners strictly prohibited. Eventually, Helmut is forced by the others to perform or be beaten. His act bombs and he leaves the barracks depressed, trying the routine out again alone in the prison yard. He hears laughter and sees a group of Jewish children watching him through a fence. Helmut makes a makeshift clown suit and begins to regularly perform, but a new prison Commandant orders Helmut to stop. When he refuses and continues to perform, he's beaten and thrown in solitary confinement. But the Nazis soon come up with a use for Helmut, keeping the children quiet as they are loaded into a boxcar to be sent to another camp. Helmut complies, but is accidentally locked in with the children and arrives the next day at Auschwitz.

Okay, going from this, it's safe to assume we're in solid pathos territory here. World War II Germany, Nazis, concentration camps, oppressed Jews, sad clowns, wrongly imprisoned self-important heels.... Well, would you expect Jerry Lewis to star in AND direct such a thing?

Yeah yeah, I know: this is where Jer' shows off his acting chops in something where clowning around is secondary. He wants to prove to the Academy that he is well worth the love and adoration of fans worldwide (and in France). This is not lost on me: Richard Pryor dazzled in films like Lady Sings The Blues and Greased Lightning, turning in fine dramatic performances in both. Steve Martin was impressive in such films as Grand Canyon and The Spanish Prisoner, where going for laughs was not in the plan. Even Jim Carrey gave us winning dramatic turns in The Majestic and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. This is nothing new.

And yes, Jerry Lewis has done slight dramatic turns in his comedies like The Stooge and The Delicate Delinquent, so something more serious should be easy.

THIS, however...?

Let's get back into analytical movie mode now and take a few small bites of the elephant at a time:

After a short poem, the movie opens on a busy circus as the clowns are getting ready to perform. One is centered on, Helmut Dorque (which is pronounced - and even written later as) Doork, who somberly gets ready. He is the last one in the procession and stumbles while holding onto the coat tails of the lead clown, Gustav, making him fall. Gustav orders the circus owner to demote Helmut, which he does. Helmut opens his trunk, looking at the advertisements from America, showing his past glory. He sheds a single tear, freezing on his face as the title comes up over him, with credits.

Okay, there's pathos already, even before the credits come up.

Helmut gets a drink from the local bar then goes home and snaps at his concerned wife Ada (Harriet Andersson), who convinces him that he is greater and far more talented than they give him credit for and convinces him to go back to the Circus immediately to reclaim his position in the circus as a clown and not a stooge. In the empty circus, as he performs his act to empty seats and imagined laughter and applause, he overhears Gustav and the circus owner planning to fire Helmut the very next day. Thoroughly distraught, Helmut returns to the bar, gets raging drunk, yells at the patrons, taunts a portrait of Hitler, does a sarcastic impersonation of Der Fuhrer then passes out, only to be grabbed up by Gestapo officers in the bar and taken away to Gestapo headquarters. After a savage talking-down by the lieutenant in charge, Helmut is processed (apparently in the two pages missing in this copy of the script) and taken to prison immediately, as his wife searches for him, only to just miss him as he is forced onto a train headed out.

More melodrama, more verbal abuse, more pathos. At least we're keeping on steady ground.

After Ada is shown alone in her hovel without Helmut, he is shown being forcibly fed his prison watery slop by a nasty guard. Helmut is taunted enough so as to almost pick up a knife against the guard but mentions his release he was promised by the commandant of the prison camp, which the guard laughs off. One of the only men who is kind to him here is Keltner, a priest, who tries to be supportive of Helmut, even when the other prisoners constantly demand Helmut entertain them, which he stubbornly refuses to do, out of self-pity for his paperwork never being reviewed after countless empty promises from the barracks guards.

Self-pity, self-hatred, despair - and this isn't even halfway through.

New prisoners come into the barrack, and one in particular named Galt (Curt Broberg) continually makes like miserable for Helmut with his constant bullying and tormenting. After one particularly brutal attack from Galt, Keltner tells Helmut the only one he hasn't really convinced that he is a clown is himself. Cue rain outside the barracks.

I know, thick and heavy at this point.

Soon Jewish prisoners are brought into the prison camp - men, women and children - separated by barbed wire and warned against fraternizing by the guards. Soon after this, being bullied by the other prisoners to do a funny act for them or risk a beating, Helmut obliges but is so frightened by the prospect that he fails to be even slightly funny. he is immediately shunned and has mud kicked in his face. Bitter and angry, Helmut soon notices that the Jewish children are laughing at his antics. He quickly clowns for them, which they enjoy immensely. However, no one else notices, which again leaves Helmut dejected - in spite of the fact that he shows he can still be funny.

It only gets worse.

Helmut manages to sneak in food to the other barracks prisoners to get large shoes, an overcoat, some chalk and so forth to build up a clown costume he promises will amuse them all. Soon, he gets more laughs from the Jewish prisoners as well as the others in the camp. A new commandant of the camp, however, has other plans for such actions, and puts a halt to any more performances. This upsets Helmut, and with the help of his barracks mates (who now want to help him) he tries to comfort the children and ends up putting on an impromptu performance while being hidden by a soccer game being staged by the other inmates. This is discovered by the guards and, while Keltner is being beaten savagely and other prisoners are beaten and shot dead, Helmut clowns and dances around, distracting the children from the gruesome deaths, even as he is being dragged away by the Nazi guards.

See what I mean?

The next scene shown Helmut severely beaten and in solitary confinement, while a trainload of children are being taken to a new concentration camp and, in an effort to keep them quiet and not arouse suspicion from the other prisoners, the commandant is convinced to release Helmut from solitary to entertain them. He performs for them , gives them bread, pretends to be a jack in the box, writes their names on their heads, but before he gets a chance to leave the boxcar before the train connects with it, Helmut is locked in with them...on their way to Auschwitz.

By this time, the subplot with Helmut's wife has all but been forgotten.

Now in Auschwitz, Helmut discovers from the commandant there that, as he has been branded an escaped prisoner, he has no choice but to entertain the newly-arrived children and then lead all of them to the gas chamber. As he does this, one child trustingly takes his hand and, leading him into the chamber, it slams shut behind him and the last scene shows Helmut performing one last time for the children and laughter filling the otherwise bare chamber.

And, then, with a last quote by John F. O'Brien, it is over.

Okay.

Now.

As far as content goes, this would not be palatable if Charlie Chaplin has starred in and directed it.

In fact, Chaplin's The Great Dictator handled this kind of hard-to-take subject matter with a certain aplomb that's lost on most modern-day directors, let alone writers and actors.

You know what, though; this kind of movie was successful when Roberto Benigni did it for Life is Beautiful. Robin Williams was even moderately successful with the concept for his movie Jakob the Liar.

But those were two entirely different styles of film-making.

Solely on reading the script used here (based on the original story by Joan O'Brien and Charles Denton, and adapted into screenplay form by Jer' himself): it is choppy and incomplete, with endless melodrama using Nazi atrocities as a backdrop for Lewis to perform his poor downtrodden sad sack of a character against - this time not for laughs but for honest-to-God drama. Which on paper is so heavy-handed and self-serving that any dramatic effect is lost and all of it becomes simply a love letter to a self-important heel who hurts everyone around him to make himself feel better.

Something else, though: there are a couple of points during the script where notes are made where some scenes involving Helmut being force-fed and where it is unbearably cold one morning are to be played up for laughs (even one scene involving a latrine and some shaved ice sound effects). This kind of lurching about is horribly out of place in a story where, for the largest part, it is to be taken seriously. To be perfectly honest, I don't think a story this mawkishly melodramatic and horrifically downbeat - all the way up to one of the most downbeat endings this side of Gregg Araki - does not deserve to have laughs. If Jerry can't bother to take the whole thing seriously, how can we?

Aside from what is attempted here, TDTCC just does not cut it either as drama, or comedy, and not even as pathos. In the end, I don't care that Jerry lost 40 pounds to play Helmut Doork. I don't care that producer Nat Wachsberger ran out of money and never paid O'Brien and Denton for rights to use the story. I don't care that Jerry ended up financing everything out of pocket himself. And I certainly don't care that after TDTCC marked the beginning of a self-imposed hiatus from the screen for Jerry Lewis that lasted until 1980's Hardly Working (another review for another time).

The only thing I do care about The Day The Clown Cried is that, in review of everything on display here, that it in fact STAYS in Jerry's vault, safe and sound, out of the field of vision of anyone else but the man himself.

I can see Jerry, late at night, spooling in this work of his for an audience of one, marveling at what he once did, perhaps wondering if it was really the best thing for him to concentrate so much time and effort in, if it was only going to be the object of puzzlement, confusion, derision and uncertainty from everyone who had only heard of the thing.

My opinion is this: The Day The Clown Cried is best served as a cautionary tale against anyone who ever imagined what it would be like to open Pandora's Box.

But in all fairness, at least Pandora's Box didn't contain clowns, Nazis and pathos.