Jerry Lewis, the unreliable narrator: Notes on ‘From Darkness to Light’

Jerry Lewis was a lot of things to a lot of people in his day. One of those things was being the least reliable narrator of his own life story. In the time that I’ve spent absorbing writings about and by Jerry (and many interviews with the man) during the 31 years I’ve been paying tribute to him on the Funhouse TV show, I’ve discovered that Jerry often changed stories to make them more dramatic, fabricated greater and greater lies as he grew older (one small example: him suddenly saying he slept with Marilyn and trying to pass it off as a real story), and was often woefully deluded about the parameters of his talents.

Thus, the documentary From Darkness to Light, which was shown on TCM a few nights ago, presents a “different side” of Jerry, as he tells us that the long-sought-after, unfinished, unedited film “The Day The Clown Cried” was “bad work,” which he realized after shooting much of the film — a rare admission of defeat from a world-class egomaniac. The documentary, directed by Eric Friedler and Michael Lurie, offers scenes from the unfinished film, following the plot as best it can when it’s pretty evident that Jerry was altering the script (or scripts, as various revisions existed) as he went along and was doting on certain things (his character being a sad but noble clown) while leaving other things out (namely any additional dimensions to all the other characters).

In order to complete this piece after freshly watching the documentary, I’ll introduce some points as they are, just so this doesn’t become a treatise on a documentary that itself covers a lot of ground — some of it excellently, some of it not as well. 

Names/words that are missing. There are certain invaluable voices heard in the doc, including those of the Swedish cast and crew, filmmaker/clown Pierre Etaix (who acted in the film), and the late filmmaker Jean-Jacques Beineix, who assisted Jerry on the production’s shoot in France. 

Certain words and names, though, are never uttered in the 113 minutes of the doc. There is no narration for the film, so all statements are attributed to the talking head saying them, the most notable of whom is Jerry himself, who sat for a full interview about “Clown” explicitly for this documentary. 

The biggest missing word is “ego,” as “Clown” was clearly a major act of ego; Jerry and others skirt around this, but no one wants to lay it on the line and note that Jerry was always his own biggest fan and could’ve possibly delivered a misguided but still watchable film if he hadn’t chosen himself for the lead role. 

Jerry and Pierre Etaix.

“Drugs” is another missing word. Jerry did admit in his later years that he was addicted to painkillers for decades (and it really shows in his work of the Seventies; check out his bleary eyes in Hardly Working). Besides the fact that he had an immense regard for his own talents, he also was “enhanced” by chemicals; his son Joseph (in a famous National Enquirer essay) blew the whistle on the amount of cocaine that was found in Jerry’s personal bathroom. 

The names of the original scripters of “Clown” are also surprisingly absent in the doc. Joan O’Brien and Charles Denton wrote the first drafts of the script and Jerry made all kinds of alterations to transform his character from an unlikable sort who undergoes a transformation in the concentration camp into a suffering “hysterical” clown who is always sympathetic.

O’Brien is obliquely mentioned as the unnamed original “author” who didn’t want to sell Jerry the rights to her story once she saw his film. (This was contradicted by TCM host Ben Mankiewicz telling us that Jerry’s son Chris said O’Brien *was* willing to sell the rights; Chris was an employee of his father, working on his website among other things — he seems like a lovely guy but is always there with a diplomatic contradiction to differ with something stated about his father, who of course disinherited him and his brothers.)

The final name that isn’t uttered is that of Frank Tashlin. There is a section of the documentary that explores Jerry’s filmmaking. It includes quotes from admirers including Martin Scorsese (who is interviewed by Wim Wenders!). There are claims made about the vibrant color palette that Jerry used, his facility with gags, and the visual style of his work. 

Frank Tashlin and Jerry.

Jerry’s first six films do indeed have deliriously wonderful images and stylization, but the more one sees of the films of Frank Tashlin (one of Jerry’s mentors and the one he most borrowed from — lock, stock, and barrel), the more one sees how Jerry’s own talent was overlaid on top of lessons he learned from Tashlin. The documentary is so intent on erasing Tashlin’s importance, in fact, that they credit the film Cinderfella to Jerry, when it was directed by Tashlin. (Although unreliable narrator Jerry claimed on the DVD commentary track for the film that he directed the best scenes in the picture and ascribes the worst scene, which he acknowledges is the worst, to “Frank.”)

Contextualization that shows other comic filmmakers getting it right. An early segment of the film shows comedies that mocked the Nazis beautifully: Chaplin’s The Great Dictator, Lubitsch’s To Be or Not to Be, and Mel Brooks’s The Producers. The latter is incredibly important in terms of discussing “Clown” since only briefly is it mentioned (by Harry Shearer) that Jerry’s films from the late Sixties and early Seventies were bad movies that made very little money. 

By 1970 when Jerry was making a film as truly dreadful as Which Way to the Front? (which has a whole Nazi humor section and looks like a bad sitcom episode), Mel Brooks was already on the scene making much more accomplished comic films (as was Woody Allen, who has uttered only a few lines about the Nazis, but his films from Take the Money and Run to Love and Death were absolutely sublime and examples of where comedy filmmaking went in the Seventies, which was straight past Jerry). 

The producer as villain. The documentary basically places the lion’s share of the blame for the film’s production ending suddenly on its producer, Nat Wachsberger. He apparently stopped paying the crew, ceased communication with Jerry, and let the rights lapse to the original script by O’Brien and Denton, thus making the entire production “illegal.” 

Jerry “walked away.” The talking heads seen in the film are very reverent on the topic of Jerry Lewis. Thus the phrase “walked away” is used to his departing the set in Sweden. If one reads between the lines, it sounds more like Jerry abandoned the cast and crew. (Although it is noted here and is verified in some sources that he did put a few million into the production itself, he clearly did not want to pay the salaries of the cast and crew.) 

Was Harry Shearer lying? The documentary focuses on the production of the film and its plot; the cult that has developed around the notion of the film is only briefly referred to. That cult began with an article in Spy magazine in which Harry Shearer talked about having seen a tape of the full movie.

All the stories we’ve subsequently heard about the film have mentioned that it was never assembled by Jerry into a coherent feature. Although — and this is nowhere mentioned in the doc — it was indeed also seen in a supposed 75-minute compilation that French filmmaker Xavier Giannoli showed to various people, including a former editor of the Cahiers du Cinema, Jean-Michel Frodon. 

Frodon has noted that what he saw was a “rough, preliminary edit,” and that is what we see scenes from in the documentary (as the doc-makers add film leader in between some shots to show some images are not present [or were never filmed?]). What is notable about what is included in the doc is that it seems to cover the much-discussed-but-never-seen ending of the film, in which Jerry’s clown character ushers children into a gas chamber. 

Clown looks badly paced, poorly acted, and has a low-budget look and tone. In the years since the Spy article, countless speculation has appeared about what “Clown” would be like. What the documentary ends up showing is a film that looks cheaply produced, has questionable casting decisions (the most important of which is Jerry himself), and it looks to have deadly dull pacing — hardly the camp masterpiece that people have been waiting for for years now. And more like the episode of “Ben Casey” in which Jerry played a doctor who acted clownish to entertain his patients; his performance in these clips most closely resembles the “Casey” episode and his super-“sincere” turn in a TV version of “The Jazz Singer.” 

The major revelation of Darkness is viewing the scenes with the children, which should be stunningly offensive or unintentionally hysterical. Instead, it’s just more of Jerry thinking whatever he did was instantly funny. He conceived of himself as a classic clown in the mode of his silent-movie heroes (which did not include Keaton, whom he was always rather rude about) and circus clowns, whom he felt a kinship to (and in fact stole his clown makeup from the design worn by Emmett Kelly for decades).

The moments with the children are revelatory, though, since talking-head Jerry says that he didn’t care for them — “Where’s the comedy?” he bellows to Friedler, convinced four decades on (his interview was conducted seemingly in the early 2010s) that he could have, and should have, made the film funnier. This is a killer example of Deluded Jer, showing that he didn’t understand the lesson that Benigni obeyed in Life Is Beautiful: Don’t get too carried away with big gags once the characters are inside the concentration camp!

The makers of the documentary clearly admired Jerry and wanted to honor his memory, so they don’t pursue the cult that has evolved around “Clown,” including the staged readings that were run by Patton Oswalt and David Cross. I saw one of these in Manhattan, where Jay Johnston did a terrific turn as the Clown by *not* at all impersonating Jerry and just playing the character in a totally straightforward way. For their part, Cross and Oswalt kept overselling the jokes that they recited from Jerry’s handwritten notes in the script. 

Friedler and Lurie clearly didn’t want to pursue at any length the strong notion that one gets from the testimony presented in the film — that, despite the alleged crookedness of the producer, Jerry also sank the project from the beginning by casting himself in the lead role and rewriting what O’Brien and Denton had written. His final hasty departure from the set is presumably the reason Harriet Andersson (who has been quoted as saying that she was never paid for her work on the film) is not interviewed.

But the documentary does succeed in conveying the essence of “Clown.” That essence is that the film’s non-existence as a finished work is most likely a just finale for the project (despite the financial screwing of the cast and crew), since the one time here that Jerry most decidedly is not an unreliable narrator is when he declares the damned thing “bad work!”

Note: For those who would like to see the entirety of the interview Jeanne Moreau conducted with Jerry about "Clown," click here. (Subtitles in English by yrs truly) Thanks to Jon Whitehead of Rarefilmm for helping me see this doc.