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Has Jerry Lewis’s ‘Lost’ Holocaust Clown Film Been Found?

A Swedish actor says he has a stolen version that “must be seen.” Why do people care so much?

There was plenty of public skepticism about both the project’s premise and how it would be executed — Lewis hadn’t yet shown off his dramatic acting abilities in Martin Scorsese’s The King of Comedy; at the time, he was mostly known for comedic roles in movies such as The Nutty Professor. Now, he’s coming forward because what he did will be public soon anyway — he participated in From Darkness to Light, a documentary about the making of The Day the Clown Cried that premiered at the 2024 Venice Film Festival and is reportedly set to release in Sweden this summer. In 2024, the U.S. Library of Congress invited Benjamin Charles Germain Lee, a scholar studying the Holocaust whose grandfather allowed Auschwitz, to become the first member of the public to watch the footage that it had gotten from Lewis in a 2014 donation, under the condition that it could not be screened for a decade.

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