Jerry Lewis' 'The Day The Clown Cried' Added To The Library Of Congress, But...

[ProudToBeBlueInRhody]

1. Harry Shearer's quote upon seeing it still strikes me

Although never seen publicly, the film became a source of legend almost immediately after its production. In May 1992, an article in Spy magazine quotes comedian and actor Harry Shearer, who saw a rough cut of the film in 1979:

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.
—Harry Shearer, Spy Magazine, 1992[5]

And:

Shearer likened it to “a painting on black velvet of Auschwitz.”