Man who stole copy of Jerry Lewis' notorious Nazi clown movie comes clean 45 years later

CBC

2 days ago

Hans Crispin still can't explain what compelled him to make an illegal copy of Jerry Lewis's infamous Nazi clown movie in 1980 and stash it away in a bank vault.
But 45 years later, the Swedish actor and one-time film thief is relieved that his secret is finally out.
"It's a funny feeling," Crispin, 66, told As It Happens host Nil Kӧksal. "To be honest with you, it has been a curse and a blessing at the same time."
Last month, Crispin revealed to film magazine Icon and Swedish broadcaster STV that he possessed a stolen copy of 1972's The Day the Clown Cried, the long-lost film that has taken on a legendary status among curious cinephiles.
Since then, he says he's sold it to a new "custodian" whose name he wouldn't reveal.
"I can't tell you where it is because I signed a disclosure deal," he said. "But it is in a very good hand and it's in a very good situation."
Making porn tapes and doing crimes
The Day the Clown Cried has been described as the "Holy Grail" for film buffs, as well as " the worst movie ever made" — despite having never been publicly screened in full.
Lewis, the late U.S. actor known at the time for his slapstick comedy, was trying to take his career in a new direction when he directed and starred in the movie about a clown imprisoned at the Auschwitz extermination camp during the Holocaust.
But a combination of public controversy, copyright issues and money problems prevented him from finishing or releasing the film.
Crispin started hearing rumblings about the debacle in 1980 when he was 21 years old and landed a job copying adult films onto VHS tapes at Europafilm, the now defunct Swedish studio behind The Day the Clown Cried.
"The company I was working for was breaking into the porno market," he said. "VHS was brand new in Sweden, and it was very lucrative, but they didn't want to advertise that this was done for regular customers. So they hired a bunch of us misfits to do this nightly."
He soon learned there were nitrate film reels of The Day the Clown Cried at the studio, stored in a concrete locker because they were highly flammable. An editor who worked on the film, he says, told him not to touch it under any circumstances.
"Curiosity took the hold of me," he said.
Crispin and an unnamed co-conspirator found the key to the locker, pilfered the film, made a copy, then returned both the movie and the key, he said.
He knew that if he got caught, his career would be "in the toilet," he said. He's still not sure why he did it, but he thinks he was motivated, in part, by a desire to preserve this mysterious movie that had captivated his imagination.
"I realized that if this was to be saved, somebody has to do something," he said. "And I did."
His stolen prize was, at first, incomplete. Only eight of the nine acts were stored at Europafilm in Sweden. But in 1990, he says an envelope arrived in the mail containing the missing opening act, which had been shot separately in France.
Crispin edited it together to complete the film.
He kept it mostly a secret for decades, but came forward to local media, he says, after appearing in a documentary about the movie, From Darkness to Light, which premiered at the Venice Film Festival in 2024 and will air in Sweden this summer.
Lewis hated the film
Over the years, Crispin says, he has shown the film to "a very few select people," including most recently, Icon reporter Caroline Hainer and journalists from Swedish broadcaster STV, to prove his story was true.
Despite the hype, Hainer described the film as "quite boring."
Lewis also famously hated it.
"It was all bad and it was bad because I lost the magic," he told Reuters in 2013. You will never see it, no-one will ever see it, because I am embarrassed at the poor work."
University of Washington professor Benjamin Charles Germain Lee disagrees.
Lee hasn't seen Crispin's cut of the movie. But last year, he became the first member of the public to see the unaired footage that Lewis took home from the set himself more than 50 years ago.
"I think the film in so many ways looms so large in so many people's imaginations because this idea or this conceit of a clown in a concentration camp, of course, seems rather objectionable to the imagination. But what I saw genuinely surprised me," Lee told CBC.
"In many senses, the film makes a more nuanced attempt to engage with this question of humour in the face of atrocities, specifically around the Holocaust."
Three years before his 2017 death, Lewis donated his footage from the movie to the U.S. Library of Congress on condition they keep it private for 10 years.
Lee, the grandson of a Holocaust survivor, happened to have a fellowship at the Library when those restrictions were lifted.
"I thought about how the stars were aligning," Lee said. "Here I was having the opportunity to go see Jerry Lewis's own footage of him playing a clown in the same concentration camp that my grandmother was at."
What Lee saw wasn't a film, but rather several hours of unedited footage, outtakes and disconnected audio. Still, he says, he found it both fascinating and harrowing, and credited Lewis for being "able to capture this idea or this tension between humour and tragedy."
For Crispin, crime eventually pays
It remains unclear what will happen to the movie now. Crispin would not say who he sold it to, or how much he sold it for.
"I wouldn't say it's lucrative. I would say, like, somebody has given me a parking fee for taking care of it for 45 years," he said.