Controversial 'lost' Jerry Lewis film discovered in Sweden after 53 years

Summary

One of cinema's most sought-after lost films has been discovered after having been kept secretly in the collection of a Swedish actor for 45 years. Comedian Jerry Lewis's controversial holocaust film The Day the Clown Cried, shot in 1972 but never released, was thought to not exist in finished form.But Hans Crispin, star of the beloved 1980s Swedish TV series Angne & Svullo, claims he stole a complete workprint of the film from the archives of its production studio in 1980 – and has been screening it for guests in his apartment ever since. “I have the only copy,” Crispin told Swedish state news broadcaster SVT. “I stole it from Europafilm in 1980 and copied it to VHS in the attic where we copied other films at night.“I've kept the copy in my bank vault,” Crispin added.Crispin recently screened a full copy to journalists from SVT and Sweden's Icon magazine to prove his claim was true. “You're the 23rd and 24th people I've shown it to,” he told Icon and SVT. The actor also revealed that his initial copy was missing the opening six-minute sequence of the film shot in Paris, which was mailed to him anonymously in 1990, along with a note saying that the sender knew he possessed a copy of the rest of the film.Will The Day The Clown Cried be released to the public?Now that he has come out into the open, Crispin intends to make his copy available for the world to see, saying: “It must be seen!”Crispin added: “I think I want to hand it over to the next generation. With today's technique, it can be restored. I want to sell it to a serious producer who either restores it or keeps it locked away, or restores it and shows it to people for studying purposes.”The film tells the story of a German circus clown who is imprisoned in a Nazi concentration camp for mocking Adolf Hitler and is then forced to lure children to their deaths as punishment.Lewis, who directed and starred in the film as clown Helmut Doork, donated five hours of footage to the US Library of Congress in 2015, add...