10 Actors Who Blamed Themselves For Films Failing

At least every other film on this list actually got released.

Jerry Lewis' unfinished 1972 film The Day the Clown Cried was a Holocaust drama written, directed by, and starring Lewis, where he plays a circus clown imprisoned in a Nazi concentration camp, who serves as a pied piper-like figure to usher children into the gas chambers.

The difficulty of such a project speaks for itself, and though Lewis approached the material with an absolutely sober level of seriousness, even losing 35 pounds for the role, the film never hit screens due to a rights dispute with the originator of the story, Joan O'Brien.

Lewis eventually decided to shelve the film entirely, having decided that it didn't live up to his vision, later vowing that it would never be screened while he was alive.

Of his work on the film, he additionally said, "You will never see it. No one will ever see it, because I am embarrassed at the poor work," and "I was embarrassed. I was ashamed of the work, and I was grateful that I had the power to contain it all, and never let anyone see it. It was bad, bad, bad."

Lewis passed away in 2017, and though there have been rumblings that a full print of the film was given to the Library of Congress shortly before Lewis' death, the actor's own son maintains that no complete print exists.

Despite what Lewis himself says about his work on the film, there are nevertheless many who would love to see it for themselves.