Black Clown

The Day the Clown Cried is an unfinished and unreleased 1972 drama film directed by and starring Jerry Lewis about a circus clown imprisoned in a Nazi concentration camp. A co-production between Sweden and France, it was based on an original screenplay by Joan O'Brien and Charles Denton, from a story idea by O'Brien, with additional material from Lewis. The film has gained notoriety and mystique over the decades both for its controversial premise and as a well-known example of an unfinished film. Lewis repeatedly insisted that The Day the Clown Cried would never be released, but later donated an incomplete copy of the film to the Library of Congress in 2015 under the stipulation that it was not to be made available before June 2024. Several documentaries have featured some scenes from the film. In August 2024, all five hours of the film's footage held by the Library of Congress was screened for journalist Benjamin Charles Germain Lee, who confirmed in a subsequent article that what exists is fragmentary and that a fully finished film does not exist in the Library's collection. On 28 May 2025, the Swedish periodical Icon Magazine and SVT's Kulturnyheterna revealed that actor Hans Crispin possessed a complete workprint of the film. He had stolen and made a copy of the eight Swedish acts of the film while working at Europafilm in 1980, and in 1990 received an unexpected gift of a copy of the opening French act from a former colleague, completing it. He showed the film to journalists as proof. On 17 June it was reported to have been sold for a "modest sum", with Crispin not revealing the name of the buyer.