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.

Although he was once a famous performer who toured North America and Europe with the Ringling Brothers, Doork is now past his prime and receives little respect.

His only friend in prison is a good-hearted German named Johann Keltner, whose reason for being interned is never fully revealed but is implied to be his outspoken opposition to the Nazis.

Seeing a use for him, the commandant assigns him to help load Jewish children on trains leading out of the internment camp, with the promise his case will be reviewed.

In 1971, while performing at the Olympia Theatre, Lewis met with producer Nat Wachsberger, who offered him the chance to star in and direct the film with complete financial backing from his production company and Europa Studios.

Before he had been given the offer, several stars such as Bobby Darin, Milton Berle, and Dick Van Dyke were also approached, but declined.

Some laugh—how do I pull it off?However, after re-reading Joan O'Brien and Charles Denton's first draft, Lewis felt that he would be doing something worthwhile in portraying the horrors of the Holocaust.

In February 1972, he toured the remains of Auschwitz and Dachau concentration camps and shot some exterior views of buildings in Paris for the film, all the while reworking the script.

After shooting wrapped, Lewis announced to the press that Wachsberger had failed to make good on his financial obligations or even commit to producing.

Wachsberger retaliated by threatening to file a lawsuit of breach of contract and stated that he had enough to finish and release the film without Lewis.

When asked to sum up the experience of the film overall, he responded by saying that the closest he could come was like "if you flew down to Tijuana and suddenly saw a painting on black velvet of Auschwitz.

In the original script, the protagonist was an arrogant, self-centered clown named Karl Schmidt, who was "a real bastard", according to O'Brien.

She stated that the original draft was about the redemption of a selfish man, but that Lewis practically changed the entire story into a Chaplinesque dark comedy à la The Great Dictator.

[13] In the June 2001 Spin article "Always Leave 'Em Laughing", author Bowman Hastie writes of Life Is Beautiful and Jakob the Liar, similar themed Holocaust films released twenty-plus years after Lewis' The Day the Clown Cried, "All three movies shamelessly use the Holocaust — and the impending death of children — as a vehicle for the star's most base, maudlin ideas about his own beneficent selflessness and humanity.

[17] The French version of the same text, titled "Le Jour de Jerry, et la nuit", was later published in the film journal Trafic.

Frodon reported that while the copy he watched was obviously a rough preliminary edit, it generally followed the published script and did not seem to be missing any major story elements.

[28] In the 2016 documentary The Last Laugh, which explored the limits of humor regarding the Holocaust, comedian David Cross reflected Lewis was "too ahead of his time.

[29] Similarly Amy Wallace in GQ Magazine wrote: "He was mercilessly criticized for attempting to mix comedy with the ultimate tragedy.

The point is that, in the early 1970s, when the very term 'the Holocaust' was hardly known and when the extermination of six million Jews by Nazi Germany was a little-discussed phenomenon, at a time before Claude Lanzmann made Shoah, Lewis took it on.

The moral complicity, the self-scourging accusation of the role of the clown in amusing children en route to their destruction, is itself as furious a challenge to himself, and to the entertainment of the time, as any by the most severe critic of media.

He was doing so at a time of virtually no Holocaust scholarship in academia, minimal recognition of the loss of European Yiddish culture, with limited public documentation, and only the initial stirrings of survivor testimonies.

[33] That same year, the Jerry Lewis official museum website stated: "The film (is) tied up in litigation... and all of the parties involved have never been able to reach an agreeable settlement.

Jerry hopes to someday complete the film, which remains to this day a significant expression of cinematic art, suspended in the abyss of international litigation".

[1] On August 5, 2015, the Los Angeles Times reported that Lewis had donated a copy of the film to the Library of Congress, under the stipulation that it not be screened for about a decade.

[35] Rob Stone, curator of the Library of Congress, has stated that they would not be able to loan the film to other theaters or museums without permission from Lewis' estate.

[citation needed] In a January 2019 interview with World Over, Lewis's son Chris stated there is no complete negative of the film and that outstanding copyright issues prevented a release.

[citation needed] In August 2024, the Library of Congress' complete footage from the film was screened privately for The New Republic's Benjamin Charles Germain Lee.

[3] In September 2024, a documentary on The Day the Clown Cried entitled From Darkness to Light premiered at the Venice International Film Festival.

[41][42] Jim Wright revealed to the press his plan to produce a new version of The Day the Clown Cried, and he mentioned he had Richard Burton in mind for the title role.

By 1991, producer Michael Barclay announced that he and Tex Rudloff (apparently with the help of Washington lobbyist Jack Abramoff[43][44]) were preparing a joint production of Clown with the Russian film studio Lenfilm.