Jerry Lewis called his unreleased 1972 movie “The Day the Clown Cried,” about a clown in Auschwitz who convinces children to go to their deaths, an “embarass[ing] poor work” and said it would never be released.
This 35-minute fan-edit assembles all known footage from the film, along with title-cards from the script, to give you a sense of just how right Lewis 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.
— Harry Shearer, Spy magazine, 1992[5]
The Day the Clown Cried
[Wikipedia]
(Thanks, Fipi Lele!)