‘From Darkness To Light’: Venice Review

Dir/scr: Eric Friedler, Michael Lurie. US. 2024. 108mins

Documentaries about films-gone-spectacularly-awry abound — from Eleanor Coppola’s Hearts of Darkness to Jodorovsky’s Dune and Gilliam’s Misplaced In La Mancha wrestle, to not point out Herzog’s antics in Burden Of Goals. From Darkness To Gentle is much less achieved but someway extra disturbing than the entire above, telling in a festival- and streamer-friendly style how Jerry Lewis tried to make a Holocaust movie known as The Day The Clown Cried in Sweden in 1971. Like its topic, Eric Friedler and Michael Lurie’s movie just isn’t fully full, however it doesn’t minimize the viewer quick on jaw-dropping revelations – reminiscent of Lewis’s choice, for instance, to rent a German former demise camp guard because the movie’s technical advisor.

Doesn’t minimize the viewer quick on jaw-dropping revelations

The Day The Clown Cried, which was to star Lewis himself as a camp inmate and clown whose routines are utilized by the Nazis to steer kids into the gasoline chamber, was by no means accomplished, and by no means might be. Friedler and Lurie piece the story collectively from archive interviews of speaking heads – together with Lewis’s late assistant Jean Jacques Beneix, Pierre Etaix, a current-day Martin Scorsese and certainly one of Lewis’s final interviews earlier than he himself died in 2017. They be a part of actors and key crew from the set, a person who saved/stole movie footage which was being held ransom for cost by the processing lab, and, lastly, pictures from the movie itself.

There’s little doubt {that a} documentary which begins with Godard raving about Jerry Lewis has its eye on the cineaste viewers. The French, who had been famously so eager on Lewis it grew to become a joke in itself, are well-represented right here. What surprisingly isn’t handled is Lewis’s personal Jewish heritage – he was born Joseph Levitch, the son of Russian and Polish emigres – and why the funny-man turned director, producer and entrepreneur may ever have needed to make The Day The Clown Cried within the first place. The documentary reveals Mel Brooks explaining how one can make enjoyable of Nazis however the Holocaust just isn’t up for grabs, and Clown was shot again in 1971, when no American had even made a drama set contained in the camps, not to mention one a couple of clown. (Roberto Benigni’s Life Is Lovely didn’t seem till 1997.)

Because it turned out, Lewis didn’t even have the rights to it, however that was solely found later. 

With its interval settings – the Dick Cavett present has a serious supporting position – From Darkness To Gentle reveals us a Jerry Lewis coming off a fantastical career-ride. The partnership with Dean Martin, which spawned 16 movies and a Vegas residency, fractured bitterly in 1956 and Lewis, a renaissance man, moved on to direct and produce himself. (In addition to invent the video help, and begin a dismal if very-Nineteen Seventies chain of franchise-cinemas.) But, his star was waning, if you happen to don’t depend France. His studio contracts had come to an finish and Clown was to be his large step in the direction of unbiased film-making. Producer Nat Wachsberger supplied him the prospect to star and direct and he took the chance extremely severely. But all the pieces, from the subject material to the partnership with Nat Wachsberger, was a painful mistake. And it was terribly tough on him.

From Darkness To Gentle — not essentially the most memorable of titles – could be a tragic story if the movie appeared in any manner prefer it ought to have been launched. As an alternative it’s extra of a queasy object lesson in misguidedness and delusion, which runs all the way in which from Lewis to a fantasist producer and German camp guards with Swedish accents. Plenty of sorry issues occur however, in actuality, there’s no person to essentially really feel sorry for, though Scorsese does level out that Lewis didn’t work for greater than a decade after the movie imploded. 

There is no such thing as a full copy of Clown, and it may well by no means be launched in any format as it’s unlicensed. And no quantity of French Jerry Lewis admirers could make it appear to be something however a horrible lapse of judgment. Fifty years later, it’s much more digestible as parsed right here than it ever would have been on the display screen.