‘That is [Jerry] Lewis in a nutshell, obscurely brilliant, too funny to withstand…’

Lynn Crosbie:

The documentary is exciting news, and one wonders if it might, at last, reveal footage from his 1972 locked-in-a-vault film, The Day the Clown Cried, about a down-on-his-luck German clown imprisoned in a Nazi political prisoner camp.

While comedian Harry Shearer, who has seen a rough cut, compares it to seeing a black-velvet painting of Auschwitz in a Tijuana marketplace, this “Chaplinesque dark comedy” (in the words of one of the film’s writers) could be brilliant.

At the very least, it is already a great artifact in the life of a truly tragicomic figure.