Jerry Lewis' 'The Day The Clown Cried': Famously Unreleased Holocaust Clown Movie Partially LEAKS Online

Footage from The Day The Clown Cried, a famously unreleased Jerry Lewis film about a clown who is forced by the Nazis to entertain children in a concentration camp and (eventually) lead them to their death in a gas chamber, pied-piper style. You'll notice this plot sounds like the perfect place to insert some of Jerry Lewis' screwball slapstick.

Check out some behind-the-scenes footage (and the first ever look at actual screen footage) below:

Lewis vowed to hide the film forever after it received atrocius reviews at test screenings.

"It was all bad and it was bad because I lost the magic," said Lewis in an interview with Reuters at the Cannes Film Festival. "You will never see it, no-one will ever see it, because I am embarrassed at the poor work." 

A few selections of people who have seen it (from an excellent Spy piece)

Harry Shearer. actor and director:

"With most of these kinds of things, you find that the anticipation, or the concept, is better than the thing itself. But seeing this film was really awe-inspiring, in that you are rarely in the presence of a perfect object. This was a perfect object. This movie is so drastically wrong, its pathos and its comedy are so wildly misplaced, that you could not, in your fantasy of what it might be like, improve on what it really is. "Oh My God!" - that's all you can say...

[It's like] a painting on black velvet of Auschwitz....somebody's trying so hard in the wrong way to convey this strongly held feeling. " 

Lynn Hirschberg, former Rolling Stone contributor:

"I was appalled. I couldn't understand it. It was beyond normal comprehension."

Be sure to check out the clip before it inevitably gets wiped from the web.