From Darkness to Light review – Jerry Lewis’ infamous Holocaust film rescued from oblivion

Any comic will tell you that disaster is always more fun than success. The bigger the better; the face-plant is a banker. But Lewis’s experience may just be the exception, because there was nothing remotely funny about The Day the Clown Cried, which sounds utterly grisly from start to finish, from its nightmarish production (perhaps not really Lewis’s fault) to the bungled execution (for which he takes full responsibility). One pundit claims that the film erred in tackling the Holocaust instead of a wider, more generalised Nazism, citing the success of Mel Brooks’s The Producers. Another suggests that it may have been ahead of its time, pointing out that Roberto Benigni would later win an Oscar for the similarly-themed Life is Beautiful. Lewis, for his part, isn’t prepared to venture down these rabbit-holes. “It was bad work,” he says sourly. Even decades later, the man still feels the sting.