Infamous 'lost' Jerry Lewis holocaust movie acquired by library | Film | The Guardian: "It has become one of the most discussed films of all time, despite never being released, but the Los Angeles Times has reported that Jerry Lewis’s controversial comedy The Day the Clown Cried has been acquired by the Library of Congress.
The only known print of the film, made in 1971 but buried soon after, was bought by the federal cultural institution as part of a Jerry Lewis collection. But it reportedly won’t be shown for at least 10 years."
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Lewis, now 89, last spoke about the film with Entertainment Weekly in 2009. “After I’m gone, who knows what’s going to happen?” he said. “The only thing that I do feel, that I always get a giggle out of, some smart young guy … is going to come up with an idea and he’s going to run the fucking
thing. I would love that. Because he’s going to see a hell of a movie!"
'via Blog this'
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.— Harry Shearer, Spy magazine, 1992
An August 2015 article in the Los Angeles Times claims that a copy of the film is held by the Library of Congress, but will not be screened for "another ten years."
This '10 year provision' would appear to be based solely on Lewis's request to hold back his contribution for ten years, but, as the underlying rights were never acquired by Lewis or the original financiers, the film cannot be screened, published, copied or shown in any form until and unless such rights are acquired. Joan O'Brien and Charles Denton are both deceased.*
