“What if woody [sic] Allen had brain injury,” remarks the comic Adam Friedland in his rather direct Letterboxd review of Jerry Lewis’ The Ladies Man. Continuing a theme, Will Sloan also hails The Nutty Professor as a “profoundly strange object from a broken brain” in his own piece on the platform. These critical appraisals are in keeping with renewed esteem for Lewis form the past 15 years, with Greta Gerwig paying The Ladies Man’s production design one of its greatest tributes with the Barbieworld homes in her 2023 blockbuster. If comedy famously equals “tragedy + time,” the formula for posthumous acclaim is surely “outright derision + time.”
So it’s a friendlier critical welcoming the premiere of From Darkness to Light, a peculiar but insightful documentary credited to Michael Lurie and Eric Friedler. Its subject is the most untouchable and elusive piece of Lewis-lore, his very own The Other Side of the Wind: the doomed 1972 production The Day the Clown Cried, part of the first wave of international cinema addressing the Holocaust, and which floundered in rights and financing issues, coupled with Lewis’ own displeasure with his work.
A minority of us “broken brain” aficionados still dream of laying eyes on this cursed thing, and this documentary, in its way, has us covered while the Library of Congress-approved premiere of the completed footage is pushed back. A Screen interview with Lurie sheds light on his documentary’s component parts in a way the finished film keeps shrouded: the footage on display (which doesn’t eclipse more than 20 minutes) was recovered and digitized from a Swedish archive, an expected fact given its co-production origins in that country. But despite its intended greyscale lighting and color scheme being in place, along with Lewis’ highly recognizable mise-en-scène, the clips are apparently rushes and rehearsals, not duplicates of what’s kept in the Washington vaults.
The film also (and mysteriously) contains large portions of re-reappropriated talking-head footage from two prior documentaries: Der Clown, made in 2016 for German TV by Friedler and which features one of Lewis’ last-ever in-depth interviews; and The Last Laugh, by Ferne Pearlstein, a routine-looking documentary from the same year that premiered at Tribeca, meditating on how Jewish comedians such as Mel Brooks used humor to process the Holocaust. Couple that with iMovie-style transitions, an oddly dated ’90s-esque electronica score by Alexander Precht, and Jerry’s diaries in voiceover “revoiced,” as an on-screen caption says––no actor is credited, but we wouldn’t want to assume AI, right?––and you have a uniquely crappy package, in spite of its pertinence and strength of its key aspects. There’s also an exclusive interview with Martin Scorsese from this year’s Berlinale conducted by Wim Wenders, an early King of Comedy champion after it initially flopped.
Still, the documentary covers all the bases you’d want, whether as a Jerry fan or an aficionado of messy industry stories, and the interviews themselves are lively and insightful enough to deserve a second unearthing. (Also, its hodgepodge presentation fits the content, as if you’d prefer an Alex Gibney or Netflix ultra-slickness.) Like too much great comedy, The Day the Clown Cried’s sorry saga raises profoundly existential ideas: the notion of artistic responsibility, the ethics of representing atrocities, and the right-lip wiggles to attempt whilst doing a sad-clown routine (okay, not that one). In Clown, Lewis plays a German clown who’s booted into a concentration camp after he injures another performer during his act, then put to work by the commandants to use his comic abilities for further ill. It’s in terrible taste, yes, but the guy was ahead of his time: contemporary comedy feels sustained in a protracted battle to out-shock itself.
The key bulk of the story is told, adding an important, contextualizing prologue on Lewis’ reputation and an afterword wrapping everything up nicely. You watch the scraps of footage, and while it might offend conventional critical opinion, then and now, there’s something very pure about the man’s artistry––one feels him struggling to reconcile conflicting desires to be serious and commemorative with his goofball streak, offering that unique Lewis tonal and philosophical recipe present in his best work. The sincere critical defense begins writing itself in your head. As Godard on the Dick Cavett Show famously said, and shown at the documentary’s very beginning: “He’s more a painter, maybe, than a director.” From Darkness to Light is a reverent tribute to his most famous unfinished canvas.
From Darkness to Light premiered at the 2024 Venice Film Festival.
The post Venice Review: Jerry Lewis’ The Day the Clown Cried Emerges in From Darkness to Light first appeared on The Film Stage.
