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Audiences may one day get to see the completed version of The Day The Clown Cried, a controversial Jerry Lewis film thought to be lost for nearly half a decade. Actor Hans Crispin recently claimed to Swedish broadcaster SVT that he stole a copy of the film from its production studio, Europafilm, in 1980, per Sweden Herald. He reportedly copied it onto a VHS and has kept it—along with the original manuscripts—in a bank vault ever since. According to The National, Crispin also screened a copy for journalists from SVT and Sweden’s Icon magazine to prove his claim was true. “You’re the 23rd and 24th people I’ve shown it to,” he told them.
One can understand why Lewis may have been hesitant to show the world this particular film, which he starred in and directed in 1972. In The Day The Clown Cried, Lewis plays a circus clown sent to a concentration camp by the Nazis and forced to lure children to their death in exchange for his freedom. Lewis was reportedly unsatisfied with the film, which was also delayed due to financial and copyright disputes with the studio. In 2013, footage surfaced of the comedian saying, “It was all bad, and it was bad because I lost the magic… You will never see it. No one will ever see it, because I am embarrassed at the poor work,” per Entertainment Weekly. Still, he donated five hours of footage to the Library of Congress in 2015, adding a stipulation that it not be viewed until 2024. When it was, The New Republic journalist Benjamin Charles Germain Lee reported that the footage was “fragmentary” and “nonsequential,” concluding that the film had never been completed.
Crispin, however, claims to have a full copy. While he initially didn’t save the film’s opening minutes, he says he received a tape of the sequence from an unknown sender in 1990 who knew he had the rest of the film. Now, “it must be seen,” he says. “I think I want to hand it over to the next generation. With today’s technique, it can be restored. I want to sell it to a serious producer who either restores it or keeps it locked away, or restores it and shows it to people for studying purposes.”
