10 Finished Movies That Disappeared Without A Trace

Known for his lighthearted broad comedy, zany antics and slapstick, so-called King of Comedy Jerry Lewis would not be the first person to come to mind when looking for someone to not only act in, but also write and direct a tragic Holocaust drama.

It can't be denied, though, that Lewis threw himself into this project. Spending six weeks eating nothing but grapefruit, he lost 35 pounds to play the over-the-hill German circus clown who finds an appreciative audience in the Jewish children of Auschwitz, children that he is eventually forced to lead to their deaths in the gas chamber. He even put up $2 million of his own money after the original budget ran out.

On seeing a finished cut of the movie, however, Joan O'Brien, the project's original writer, called it "a disaster" and refused to consent to the changes Lewis had made to her story, tying the movie up in legal disputes.

Lewis, for his part, also saw the finished product as shamefully bad. He would later say that: "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, who made The Day The Clown Cried in 1972 and died in 2017, spent the rest of his life refusing ever to show the film.

The Simpsons and Spinal Tap star Harry Shearer once managed to track down an almost impossible to find print and called it "so drastically wrong that you could not, in your fantasy of what it might be like, improve on what it really is." But unless the Library of Congress release the print that they own (and can legally show from 2024 onwards), the rest of us will probably never know for sure.