The year was 1972 and Jerry Lewis was embarking on the the riskiest venture of his long, successful screen career. He would star in and direct The Day the Clown Cried, a dramatic and sobering tale about a Jewish clown who is imprisoned in a Nazi concentration camp. He is only able to survive by making himself useful to his captors by distracting doomed children with his antics as he leads them to the gas chamber. The announcement that Lewis would be involved in such a production raised eyebrows at the time and more than a bit of skepticism that he could pull it off. Lewis had been one of the top boxoffice attractions in the world in the 1950s and 1960s, but by the advent of the 1970s he knew that his squeaky clean family films were out of touch with the Woodstock generation. He was convinced he could launch a new career as a dramatic star and director. However, the film ran into problems almost immediately with production funds from private sources routinely drying up. This forced Lewis to cut the budget practically to that of a home movie level. Still, he soldiered on a completed the film. However, legal battles over the rights have prevented it from ever being released. Over the years, Lewis has shown the movie to only a handful of trusted confidants. Their reaction was uniformly terrible and Lewis now accepts the blame for the movie's artistic failures, saying "I lost the magic" and vowing no one else will ever see the movie. Nevertheless, some footage has surfaced from a German documentary done at the time of production that shows Lewis on the set of the movie and a glimpses of him performing as a clown. Click here to view