No rating can be applied to a film I've only seen a couple of bits of. What I saw was some of the shtick that Jerry Lewis did as a clown and in and of itself it was in keeping with Lewis as a Chaplin acolyte.
The Day The Clown Cried has come down in cinematic urban legend as a film so bad that Jerry Lewis has kept it under lock and key for two generations now. What I saw was some bits that were shot by a Flemish television station and put on the internet. They were Jerry as clown with none of the plot of this film.
As all Lewis fans know, Jerry plays a once famous circus clown thrown into a concentration camp where he befriends the Jewish kids and then the Nazis find a fiendish use for his talents. That involving Pied Pipering them to the gas chambers.
For the life of me I could never understand why he would get involved with such a project with the ghastly plot premise. Still he did and the previews were so bad the film was shelved. Lewis also tried to keep from the public his televised production of The Jazz Singer. That we now have seen, maybe we'll see this and endure it some day.
The bits were fine, reminiscent of Charlie Chaplin. But Chaplin did The Great Dictator, not this.
The Day The Clown Cried has come down in cinematic urban legend as a film so bad that Jerry Lewis has kept it under lock and key for two generations now. What I saw was some bits that were shot by a Flemish television station and put on the internet. They were Jerry as clown with none of the plot of this film.
As all Lewis fans know, Jerry plays a once famous circus clown thrown into a concentration camp where he befriends the Jewish kids and then the Nazis find a fiendish use for his talents. That involving Pied Pipering them to the gas chambers.
For the life of me I could never understand why he would get involved with such a project with the ghastly plot premise. Still he did and the previews were so bad the film was shelved. Lewis also tried to keep from the public his televised production of The Jazz Singer. That we now have seen, maybe we'll see this and endure it some day.
The bits were fine, reminiscent of Charlie Chaplin. But Chaplin did The Great Dictator, not this.