It ended with a notoriously cringe-inducing scene of cavorting clown Lewis leading the laughing kids into the gas chamber. Overcome by the grief of what he is being forced to do, he chooses to stay in the gas chamber with them as they are killed.Let us see it. Of all the Nazi-related things to be ashamed of... maybe this excessive shame about bad art is shameful. Or is it the other way around... and more bad art should be destroyed before anyone can see it?
August 11, 2013
"It was all bad, and it was bad because I lost the magic... You will never see it. No one will ever see it..."
"... because I am embarrassed at the poor work," said Jerry Lewis about his 1972 movie "The Day the Clown Cried," a drama about a clown forced to entertain children in a Nazi death camp. But there's a bit of video from it on YouTube now. Was it really so completely horrible? Even if it was in the end, a terrible idea — but wasn't it basically the idea in "Life Is Beautiful"? — can't we see it now, with the understanding that it was a mistake and extract the good and learn from the lesson about what badness is?
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24 comments:
God has a sense of humor, but Total Evil is not capable of funny treatment. It's not a laughing matter in this world or the next.
The movie immediately prior to Clown, Which Way to the Front, another World War II comedy, is really abysmal. Even though it’s set during the forties, there is no attempt at period detail, aside from the military uniforms. The actors dress like it’s 1970, with long(ish) hair and sideburns. The two he completed in the eighties, Hardly Working and Cracking Up, are even worse. It’s hard to imagine they read any funnier than they play. If Clown is actually worse than that trio of rancid vacuum-cleaner bags, it must be one for the ages.
I thought he did some very cool things earlier as a director. This scene (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ua4suRfdbWU , can't post a hyper link) from The Ladies Man is kind of breathtaking, for instance. Maybe not exactly funny, but when things get that weird, I give him a pass.
I think at some point in the sixties his comic sense deserted simply him, completely. He was excellent in all the straight parts I’ve seen him in (King of Comedy, an episode of Law & Order: SVU, a recurring part on Wise Guys). He could have had an interesting career as a character actor. But ego, thy name is Jerry. MAD magazine used to do a ‘Contents of a Celebrity’s Wallet’ feature. Jerry’s wallet contained a letter from the Motion Picture Academy: “Dear Mr. Lewis: Thank you for your offer to host this year’s award show, AND sing all five nominated songs AND open all the envelopes while making funny faces…” Even as an 11 year old, I thought, yeah. Exactly.
Gee, at first I thought the quote was from Mariano Rivera after today's Yankee game!
Seriously, I missed the point of Lewis as a comic. I do agree that he was wonderful in King of Comedy
The only Nazi thing about which anyone now living should be ashamed is a failure to understand what part of it lives on, thrives, indeed always will. I can't be a fascist bastard, the kind that would send children into the gas, because this is 2013 and all that stuff is safely confined to 1944.
Much more embarrassing is the failure of de-nazification post WWII, the US support of nazis in German government, its protection of nazis who might have helped in the coming struggle against the Soviets, and the its elevation of high-nazi Werner von Braun.
Its ironic that, while the allies won the war against fascism, we have become them. If we had a Dachau, we would send Snowden and Assange there, as Hitler did to the mayor of Munich in 1933.
When I was 5 I thought Martin and Lewis were wonderful, at least in their movies. I never saw their nightclub act.
But now even that seems weird and cringe-inducing. His shtick got old real fast.
But I'm not a fan of the "love me, I'm stupid" act anyway.
I don't think I could bear to watch this one since his other modern efforts were so awful.
The only war movie I ever like was King of Hearts
Its ironic that, while the allies won the war against fascism, we have become them.
Playing with toys in the attic . . .
If Jerry owns the rights to the movie, then his wishes should be respected.
It is given to very few people to fail on such an epic scale. This is to movies what Operation Barbarossa was to military campaigns. Perhaps Hitler is best remembered with a failure this grandiose.
I see its Nazi Sunday here at Althouse.
Carry on.
Jerry Lewis had a successful vaudevillian comedy act with partner Dean Martin which translated nicely in motion picture comedy. Then he got too big for his britches, broke up with Dino, and set out to do solo comedy and serious acting. When that failed he has spent his public life hosting telethons while in good health.
There simply was no way he could win by agreeing to do the poorly conceived death camp movie. He just didn't have the talent.
Is there a country without bordellos? I can't think of one.
I miss Dino.
I'll never miss Jerry Lewis.
Ironic that a post by Carl that I strongly agree with is followed by a very similar comment by jimbino that I strongly disagree with.
There is mothing special about the German psyche that led to Nazism. Every day I come across people who would fit in just fine in 1930's Germany; who, in the proper environment, would have no problem rounding up demonized people and herding them into concentration camps.
But we are very very far from doing that in our current society. Jimbino, I'm always stunned when I come across assertions like yours, the arrogance of comparing your situation to that of Hitler's victims. Absolutely outrageous.
Lewis made some movies that really made me laugh. To be fair, I think this was a rotten premise. Who could have pulled it off? Shindler's List meets The Nutty Professor? it was just a tortured concept from the beginning.
Trey
"... Or is it the other way around... and more bad art should be destroyed before anyone can see it?"
That reminds me of the Flannery O'Connor quote: "Everywhere I go, I'm asked if I think the universities stifle writers. My opinion is that they don't stifle enough of them".
Heh.
Ok, now, jokes aside: Are we cringing at the general idea of portraying a Pied Piper leading kids to the gas chambers? Or at Lewis's specific portrayal in this specific instance?
Don't get me wrong, I'm not about to say that the idea itself is free of qualms or provocation. The killing of children in Nazi Germany is utterly horrific, even when considered fictionally. It is all too easy for such a portrayal to be done in poorly, and in bad taste. But, given that executions of children did happen under that regime, and sometimes occurred with accompanying adults, the question is, can such an incident be portrayed fictionally in any way without being offensive and tasteless? (Granted, the real world cases did not have a clown leading a line of merry children to their deaths; see http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10005142. Quote: "Janusz Korczak, director of an orphanage in the Warsaw ghetto, however, refused to abandon the children under his care when they were selected for deportation. He accompanied them on the transport to the Treblinka killing center and into the gas chambers, sharing their fate." That's not the same situation at all, but at the same time it's still a case of an adult deliberately choosing to share childrens fate without overt fighting of the state's dominant power)?
If it's possible, if such a tragic, horrific thing can be portrayed with sensitivity and taste, was that the line that Lewis crossed with that movie? Or was it just that he even took on the idea?
Sure, it's definitely possible that the movie stinks simply because it's executed poorly and Lewis was his normal, batty character in a situation where such was inappropriate. I can think of any number of comedians who's schtick would be funny in one context and God-awfully embarrasing in another. Heaven forbid we'd ever get the Happy Gilmore version of Adam Sandler in, say, a movie about Columbine. But at the same time, it can be a powerful critique to portray how enabling many parts of German society was towards the Nazi regime, even if it were against their better judgement. Hannah Arendt already presented this thesis in her coinage of the term "banality of evil", and the notion of subverting a clown - normally an innocent entertainer of children - to serve that state's goal of executions is completely in line with what Arendt was saying: When a society accepts the state's premise, they fall prey to normalizing the monstrous.
So, the question is: Is the movie offensive because the topic is inherently so? Or did Lewis genuinely screw the pooch and just create a stinker? That's something I simply cannot tell from my perspective.
Even as a child, I never found Jerry Lewis to be amusing. Although, I was a big fan of the 3 Stooges, Laurel and Hardy, and Abbott and Costello.
His Labor Day telethon was deplorable.
Doesn't the Nazi Rule apply to discussions about bad movies about real Nazis? Should it? Does the Nazi Rule apply to questions about the Nazi Rule?
Don't give a rat's for anything Jerry Lewis did after about The Absent-Minded Professor, which was mined from Cinderfella anyway.....
But if they made another 50 films about the eastern front and the lack of humanity from the Germans, the Soviets, the Romanians, even the French (Nazi volunteers) not only between themselves but also against the Poles and the residents of the Baltic area.......it would not be enough.
Are we cringing at the general idea of portraying a Pied Piper leading kids to the gas chambers? Or at Lewis's specific portrayal in this specific instance?
I'm cringing at the clowns.
For some reason this whole discussion makes me think of M, which is creepy as hell, but has no nazi's (or at least, has no official nazi's - maybe some of the actors ended up nazi's I don't know)
By the way-- it's not a comedy. Read the synopsis on the Wikipedia page. You can't tell anything about the quality of the writing from that, but the story itself is pretty solid (if horrifying and incredibly depressing). If Lewis really attempted to turn this into a comedy, holy crap.
I think the part where Lewis is the clown performing, the performance must be comic, but the whole story is drama.
It sounds like one of my favorite movies, "Limelight," in which Charlie Chaplin plays a comic performer within a drama. His comic routines on stage are perfectly funny, but he's a tragic character. The story begins with him saving a young woman who's trying to commit suicide and ends -- spoiler alert -- with him dying onstage.
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