‘From Darkness to Light’ Review: Documentary Proves That Yes, Jerry Lewis’ Holocaust Movie Really Was Terrible

Going into the documentary “From Darkness to Light,” most reasonably well-informed movie fans would know three things about “The Day the Clown Cried,” the Jerry Lewis Holocaust movie that is the subject of this doc: It was ahead of its time, it was never finished and it probably wasn’t any good.

Coming out of “From Darkness to Light,” which premiered on Sunday at the 2024 Venice International Film Festival, you’d likely know the same three things, but at least you’d have more context and more evidence that Lewis’ legendary but unseen film is indeed a bad movie. There aren’t any real revelations in the doc, just the sad and tangled story of a questionable idea being undermined by creative choices, business conflicts and a comic icon’s determination to bury something that embarrassed him.

At one point early in the film, Lewis, in a conversation described as “one of the last interviews he ever gave,” sighs and says, “This film will take me to the end of my days.” That turned out to be an understatement, because the story of “The Day the Clown Cried” is still being told seven years after Lewis’ death in 2017 at the age of 91.

The documentary from Michael Lurie and Eric Friedler lays out that story efficiently, after using a string of testimonials to establish Lewis’ artistic credentials. If you didn’t know that he was big in France, a 1980 talk-show rave from Jean-Luc Godard may jog your memory.

But placed alongside hits like “Which Way to the Front” and “The Nutty Professor,” the unreleased “The Day the Clown Cried” was a staggering enigma, a U-turn by the slapsticky comedian in which he plays a former circus clown sent to a Nazi concentration camp where he entertains Jewish children destined for the gas chambers.  

“We didn’t even think the film existed,” Martin Scorsese says in the documentary. “We thought it was a myth.” But stories persisted for decades: It was made but never finished, or several reels were destroyed, or it was sitting in the Library of Congress ready to be screened some time after Lewis’ death… At one point, comedian Gilbert Gottfried (this doc has a very eclectic group of interview subjects) says he heard that Harry Shearer is one of the few people who has seen the movie, and Shearer confirms that he saw it courtesy of “somebody who had a video copy of the rough cut (and) liberated it for a few days.”

Shearer’s verdict? “It was like seeing a Tijuana velvet clown painting of the Holocaust.”

“The Day the Clown Cried” has been talked about for so long that very little in “From Darkness to Light” comes as a shock, though it does a good job of breaking down a tortured and fascinating journey with numerous twists and turns. Lewis fell in love with the script in the early 1960s, but knew he wasn’t yet capable of making a film about the Holocaust. He got it off the ground a decade later, rewriting the script and both directing and starring in the film as he shot scenes in Sweden and Paris. But problems with producer Nat Wachsberger (named but curiously blurred in photos from the set) helped turn the production into a nightmare.  

Lewis walked off. Lewis came back. Lewis took all the footage back to Los Angeles and was so devastated by how bad it was that he refused to finish the movie or show anything to anybody. The stories told here overlap and they’re occasionally contradictory, pieced together from different sources in a way that is always intriguing, sometimes confusing — but perhaps not authoritative.

For the first half of “From Darkness to Light,” the filmmakers drop in quick snippets from “The Day the Clown Cried,” but they’re so unfinished and brief that questions linger: Will we see a significant amount of footage? And how bad was it, really?

By the end of the doc, both questions have been answered. The film contains a lot of Lewis’ original footage, albeit in highly rough form, and for the most part, it’s pretty damn bad. Even as a number of the notable people who worked on “The Day the Clown Cried” (Jean-Jacques Benieux as second assistant director, Oscar-winning director and actor Pierre Étaix playing a master clown) are highly sympathetic to Lewis and his travails, there’s little in the footage to suggest that Lewis’ nervy Holocaust film is any sort of unappreciated gem.

Lewis himself would agree. “It was not good work,” he says. “It was bad work on the part of the writer, the director, the actor …

“I thought about it a thousand times,” he adds, “and I thought, ‘Where’s the comedy in walking children into the gas chamber?’” He has a point — but of course, Roberto Benigni won two Oscars doing something like that in “Life Is Beautiful” in 1997, a fact consistently raised by Lewis’ defenders in “From Darkness to Light.”

Was Jerry Lewis ahead of his time, a victim of a bad producer and a timid industry? That’s a reasonable conclusion after watching the documentary lay out this weird, wild tale. Was “The Day the Clown Cried” a great movie that’s gotten a bad rap? Nope.  

By the way, at one point in “From Darkness to Light,” the film tells the story of how Lewis showed footage from his film to Joan O’Brien, one of the original authors of the screenplay that Lewis rewrote. She didn’t like the footage and declined to extend his rights to the material — and now, 50 years later, it was recently announced that the original script by O’Brien and Charles Denton is back on the market and looking for a director.

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