3. Jerry Lewis - The Day the Clown Cried
This 1972 film stands out on this list because it was never released. It's become infamous due to its controversial subject matter. The film depicts a German circus clown, Helmut Doork played by the director Jerry Lewis, sent to a Nazi prison camp for drunkenly mocking Adolf Hitler. After a few years, while being used to lure Jewish children on train going to concentration camps, he accidently finds himself accompanying the children to Auschwitz and is eventually used to lead the children in to the gas chambers. The film never made it past the rough cut stage. Stockholm Studio keeps a copy under copyright laws. Lewis himself has a copy, which has only been seen by a few select people, including actor Harry Shearer. Shearer has gone on record as saying how "misjudged" the whole thing was:
"With most of these kinds of things, you find that the anticipation, or the concept, is better than the thing itself. But seeing this film was really awe-inspiring, in that you are rarely in the presence of a perfect object. This was a perfect object. This movie is so drastically wrong, its pathos and its comedy are so wildly misplaced, that you could not, in your fantasy of what it might be like, improve on what it really is. "Oh My God!" that's all you can say.
Lewis also never plans to release the film, saying "In terms of that film, 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. We may never see The Day the Clown Cried, which may be a good thing, and maybe we owe it to Lewis not to see it, but it certainly sounds like a fascinating case of a talent misjudging what he's capable of doing artistically.