10 Famous Lost Films You Wish You Could Watch
1. The Day The Clown Cried (1972)
The Day the Clown Cried is quite possibly one of the most infamous unreleased, presumed lost, films in all of film history due to its controversial content and director Jerry Lewis' subsequent dismissal of anything to do with the film.
The film's story involved a washed-up clown, played by Jerry Lewis, who is imprisoned in a Nazi concentration camp during WW2. After his imprisonment, he finds himself performing for the imprisoned Jewish children there. But in a cruel twist of fate, the clown finds himself being used, in Pied Piper fashion, to lead the Jewish children to the gas chambers at Auschwitz.
Yeah, just let all that sink in.
Despite initial high hopes, Jerry Lewis later vowed to never let anyone see it due to his embarrassment of the final product. Despite hiding the film away forever, there remains a sort of morbid curiosity about the film which makes everyone want to watch it even more.
One of the few people in the world who has seen the film, Harry Shearer, best summarised this curiosity by saying "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."