Stan apparently isn’t so down with the clown. Maybe this is one of those objects that has more life as a description of a thing than as a thing, but I’ve wanted to see this ever since I first heard of it. I was drawn to Jerry Lewis in my early 20s because he was so garish. He was pure naked desire for approval onscreen, alternating between desperation and angrily acting out. Jim Carrey acted childish, but Jerry Lewis was essentially a maladjusted child-onscreen at least.
So him directing a Holocaust movie is just a perfectly wrong object. His sad clown in other movies was always him mugging as an Emmett Kelly clown velvet. Harry Shearer said in an interview with Spy Magazine that Lewis has his pinky ring on the entire movie. Lewis seemed to approach this project as though it would finally make everyone not named Jean Luc Godard take him seriously, a much different underlying motivation than the other two movies (presuming Jojo is anything like I think it is, haven’t seen it.) The scripts that are available paint this as a much darker movie than Life Is Beautiful. Lewis is an alcoholic clown who is hired by Nazis to entertain children packed in trains headed to camps. From the clips that have surfaced, Lewis seems to be doing a lot of rodeo clown shtick.
This has the potential to be Mexican Santa Claus bad. As someone who has gotten a lot of joy out of terrible movies, this just oozes the potential to be something monumentally wrong. And sometimes, that’s all I want from a movie.
I believe that is his job. To lure children to the gas chambers, wrangle them with his jokes like a rodeo clown.