He doesn’t regret stealing the film. Even though Hans Crispin describes his 45-year history with it as ”a quest and a curse.” And even though he has, at times, suffered from anxiety, lived in fear of ending up in jail, or, at the very least, losing his career. Over the years, unusual things have happened. Strangers have reached out. Four German photographers have sat on his couch. He has had film clips sent to him anonymously.
– There have been times when I have thought: ”Will I never be free from this?” He tells me.
In his apartment at Gärdet in Stockholm, the walls are decorated with film curiosities. A handwritten letter from Michael Palin, an original Modesty Blaise drawing, and a black and white photo of Crispin himself as the character Agne, next to the comedian Micke ”Svullo” Dubois with whom he performed in a double act in the nineties. In the living room, I spot a couple of large machines that are used to convert video into different formats, gathering dust.
On the wall hangs a large, framed poster for the film, Der Clown, a documentary about one of the film world’s greatest mysteries, comedian Jerry Lewis’s missing Nazi clown film, The Day the Clown Cried. The movie, shot in Stockholm in 1972, was subsequently deemed by Lewis himself to be so bad–but above all so controversial–that he made sure it would never be shown. He left the set with three rolls of film under his arm and a vow to keep the film sealed forever from public view. The remaining rolls of film vanished. As far as the world knew, the film never even existed.
Hans Crispin asks me to sit on the couch and turns to the enormous TV screen on the wall. A few clowns, including Jerry Lewis, appear in a crimson-red circus ring that is curiously empty of spectators. According to Crispin’s calculations, I will be the 20th or 21st person in the world to see the missing film in its entirety. Complete with the first act which, unlike the rest of the film, was shot in Paris.
The plot is as follows: Helmut Doork (Lewis), a highly-regarded though self-absorbed professional clown, has lost his spark and has been demoted accordingly. To what? I don’t know, some kind of low status clown on the circus circuit. After making a joke about Adolf Hitler, Doork is sent to a concentration camp where he receives an offer: lead the children to the gas chamber with your clowning skills and you shall be free.
An hour and a half later I have seen the work that changed Jerry Lewis’ career, altered Crispin’s life, and baffled film enthusiasts for over 45 years. I have seen Swedish highbrow, Dramaten-schooled actors play Jews and Nazi prison guards. They speak the kind of English that was taught in 1950s elementary schools, but with an added ”German” accent. At times, it is impossible to understand what they are saying. The film is not at all what I was led to believe it might be: a precursor to Roberto Benigni’s Life is Wonderful. There is no humor here, only tragedy. Quite boring, all in all. In my notebook I have written a single line: ”You are not the clown I remember”.
– Lewis has said that he regretted his decision that the Swedes should speak with a German accent. That is understandable, says Crispin from the armchair where he now sits. It only occurs to me then that he must have seen the film, at the very least, 20 times over.
For an outsider, or someone who is not familiar with how certain films accumulate immense, almost mythical status, it may be difficult to see the value in Crispin’s big reveal, his sharing of a secret he has kept for decades. But consider for a moment that it is not even common knowledge that Jerry Lewis shot a Nazi clown film in Stockholm in 1972. That is astonishing in itself. Why hasn’t anyone heard about it? That, in itself, is a clue to just how significant it really is.
Another example of the film’s historical and cultural value, and Crispin’s part in it, are the first scenes in the documentary From Darkness to Light (2024), one of several documentaries about the lost film we have just seen. In it, one of the world’s greatest directors, Martin Scorsese, says: ”We thought the film was a myth.” In the next scene, there is Hans Crispin.
It’s the holy grail when it comes to lost films. It’s the only one that hasn’t turned upHans Crispin
Books, documentaries, and TV shows have been made about it and to this day there are endless discussions in internet forums about what really happened on set and whether the film is really “the worst in the world”, as it has been dubbed. I would now be able to go online and say that it may not be the worst in the world, but it is very boring and the Swedish actors don’t do a particularly good job. It looks like they are acting in a school play. Lars Amble is wearing a Nazi uniform. But if I made my newly-acquired knowledge public, no one would believe me. I ask my friend Björn Olsson, who is one of Sweden’s most highly-respected film collectors, what he has heard about Lewis’ film. Stupid question.
– Look, it’s the holy grail when it comes to lost films. It’s the only one that hasn’t turned up, which has given it an extremely high status. The first time I heard about it was sometime in the 1990’s when I saw the photo of Jerry Lewis rubbing his nose against the barbed wire fence, you know? In my youth I imagined it to be something along the lines of Ilsa, She-wolf of the SS, but I quickly realized that these were just twisted fantasies. I have read and seen everything I can about it, he says.
Hans Crispin was employed at Europafilm in 1980 after his dreams of becoming a helicopter pilot fell through. He was 20 years old at the time and only vaguely aware of the debacle surrounding The Day the Clown Cried. Any questions about it were shot down immediately.
– I was firmly ordered to leave it alone. Don’t touch! Don’t touch! I noticed immediately how incredibly sensitive everyone was about it. He tells me.
When Jerry Lewis began filming in 1972, he was a world-famous comedian, albeit with his glory days behind him. In 1949, Lewis and Dean Martin were the most popular comedy duo in the entire United States on stage, television, and on the comedy club circuit. In the 1960s, Lewis had great success with films such as The Nutty Professor (1963), The Bellboy (1960), and The Family Jewels (1965). So much so that he was dubbed “The King of Comedy” (later the name of a film by Martin Scorsese with Lewis in the lead role). But by the 1970s, the slapstick humor that had made him the “King of Comedy” was out of fashion. Lewis could feel his star fading and wanted to try something new; show the world that he could do more than physical humor,preferably while also honoring his Jewish ancestry (he was born Joseph Levitch). He came across the script for The Day the Clown Cried and decided that he would direct it and play the lead role himself.
During the early 1970’s, the Holocaust was a subject few filmmakers dared to approach. The wounds were still too fresh. Making a film about a clown in a concentration camp was “daring,” to say the least and shooting it in the US would never have been permitted. Stockholm became the shooting location because producer Nat Wachsberger brought in the Finnish-Swedish film producer Jack S. Kotschack, who had his home and family in the Swedish capital. At the suggestion of Ingmar Bergman, and with the help of Kotschack, the film was then cast with the strongest names in Swedish theater at the time: Tomas Bolme, Lars Lind, Lars Amble, Fredrik Ohlsson, and Ulf Palme. The Swedes were assigned to play either prisoners (Jews) or prison guards (Nazis). Bergman favorite Harriet Andersson plays Doork’s wife. Swedish film company Europafilm helped with financing and built a “concentration camp” in Frösundavik in Solna in northern Stockholm.
When Crispin took a job at Europafilm 1980, the company had enjoyed great success in the 1970’s with modern classics such as Roy Andersson’s A Love Story, Lasse Åberg’s Repmånad, and Sällskapsresan. But following a number of economical miscalculations and bad investments, the failure of The Day the Clown Cried was still an open wound, both in terms of money and prestige. Another issue was the increasing number of Swedish households buying VCRs for home use. But what if the VHS boom could be used for financial gain? Europafilm jumped on the trend and started copying pornographic films for video rental.
– An ingenious, unnamed manager thought: “Let’s have some youngsters copying porn onto VHS cassettes at night”. So we did, Crispin tells me.
This side hustle was not anything Europafilm wanted to advertise to the outside world. The copying department, located in the attic, changed completely after the regular staff had gone home and the caretaker’s angry german shepherd had been locked up.
– We sat there, eating popcorn and copying porn from the original tapes to VHS all night, says Hans Crispin.
At night, Crispin had the opportunity to continue searching for the film he had become increasingly obsessed with finding.
– I was told that there was a working copy that Wic’ Kjellin had edited. She was the grande maîtresse of Europafilm when it came to editing, and had worked with all the greats, like Bo Widerberg and Vilgot Sjöman. She said: ”Yes, a copy exists but I can’t talk about it.” At that point, I felt that if I didn’t do something immediately, who knew what would happen to the film in 20 years? So I started to get tactical.
Crispin started to set a plan in motion. He found the original script with notes in the margins, and the original drawings for the “concentration camps”. He also found the negatives in wooden boxes in the attic, secured with lead seals from the Swedish Enforcement Authority. But negatives alone were not enough, they could not be copied, Crispin needed the master tapes. Then he could convert the film into VHS format.
– I had two problems. I couldn’t operate that particular scanner and there was only one guy who knew how to work it. So I asked if he could scan the film for me if I bought him a pizza and he said “Sure”. I just needed to find the film first. That was the second problem. But I had figured out where it was. I just needed a key.
One of the reasons the film was never shown was purely legal: it turned out Lewis didn’t have full rights to the script. In addition, the money ran out and Lewis had to dig into his own pockets. Such things could probably have been resolved, film history is full of production hiccups, but Lewis simply did not want the world to see his defeat. He eventually decided that the film would never be shown and “was glad that I had the control to make sure it happened,” he said in an interview in 2013.
There is of course an irony in the fact that the more Lewis tried to erase the film’s existence, the more desirable it became. It was not until the documentary film Der Clown (2016) was released by the German-based Australian filmmaker Eric Friedler that the public gained access to some of the existing material; on YouTube there are now 31 minutes of scenes cut together from various sources. This has given film buffs a taste for more.
2024 was an important year for them. That was when the US Library of Congress was to make public everything that remains of the film. It was Lewis’s own wish that his personal collection from his entire career would end up there. But the infamous clown film, or rather parts of it, was handed over in 2014 with a special clause. Nothing was to be made public until ten years later.
I took the copy and locked it in a safe. After that I didn’t think about it anymore. Not until 1990.Hans Crispin
In the summer of 2024, the library announced that the material would indeed be available, but only for research purposes. An American university professor with Jewish roots made a big deal out of gaining access to it. In The New Republic, under the headline “I watched footage of Jerry Lewis’ Unreleased 1972 Holocaust Film,” he writes: “On Wednesday, I became the first member of the public to watch something countless cinephiles have waited decades to see.”
On the Europafilm grounds, there were four concrete casemates where nitrate film from the 1930s and 1940s was stored because they are extremely flammable. The master copy had to be there, Hans Crispin was absolutely sure of it.
– I broke into the manager’s room, which was locked. It took a bit of fiddling, but I got in. I found the key cabinet, which was surprisingly easy to pry open, and the key was just hanging there, labelled “casemate 4”. My heart was pounding and my pulse was high. In the casemate was the film. Eight boxes, eight acts, edited by Wic’ Kjellin. Everything except act one, which was filmed in Paris. But we didn’t know that at the time.
Crispin and his partner then scanned everything they had come across. When they were finished, they put the film back in the casemate and hung up the key. It was almost too easy.
– No one gave us away. And that’s the end of the story.
Or, at least, it could have been. But after a couple of days Crispin was overcome by feelings of anxiety and discomfort. He had committed a crime, maybe several. Burglary, theft, probably vandalism, and breach of contract as well. At the very least.
– I was afraid of going to jail, and of ruining my career. I was 20 at the time. We swore each other to secrecy, my partner in crime and I. I took the copy and locked it in a safe. After that I didn’t think about it anymore. Not until 1990.
The fear of reprisals made him keep quiet about his possession. The few who Crispin let in on his secret told him he could get large sums of money for it and that he should sell it. At times he considered doing so but the idea never really took hold. He snatched it for the sake of preservation, because Cripsin himself is a filmmaker. With his technical expertise he cut all the eight acts edited by Wic’ Kjellin into a coherent film. But the beginning was missing, he could see that by leafing through the original script. Where could it be? Maybe in Paris. The film had a French investor, and it was known that the first act had been shot there.
In 1990 two things happened. An envelope containing the missing first act, the one where the clowns parade in the circus ring, was sent to Crispin’s home. It turns out, Crispin and his partner in crime had not been the agile burglars they thought themselves to be. Another person in the office had figured out what they had been up to and ten years later sent a VCR cassette with the first eight minutes, together with a note that said: “Enjoy! Greetings from Olle.” Crispin saw this as a sign that there was some point in him having the film. That same year he also met Hans Klinga, who himself appears in The Day the Clown Cried (he has one spoken line: “To prison, Sir?”). It was only right, Crispin thought, to tell him that he actually had a copy of the film. Klinga swore to keep quiet, which he did for twenty-five years. In 2015, Klinga called to tell him that he was standing next to Eric Friedler and that they had gathered together as many of the Swedish actors from the film that they could find.
The director of Der Clown had never been able to let go of the story of Lewis and his clown film. He was still thinking about it. In the early 2010s, Friedler therefore decided to make a new, larger documentary in which filmmakers such as Scorsese and Mel Brooks appear. He also travelled to Stockholm in 2015, with the idea of using the old actors to recreate the scenes they were in, based on an original script he had come across. He asked Klinga to help him make the calls, to gather them up, and he managed to get a solid crew together, including Nils Eklund, Lars Lind, and Fredrik Ohlsson.
Friedler had a set built at The Film House in Stockholm, resembling the original “concentration camp” set. But seeing his old colleagues trying to recreate scenes he knew actually existed, Klinga was overcome with guilt. He then called and asked Crispin if he could tell Friedler the truth.
– I said yes. 30 seconds later someone calls and shouts: “This is Eric. What have you got?”, “What do you need?”, I replied, and fifteen minutes later Friedler, a German scriptwriter, four photographers and Hasse Klinga were sitting here on the sofa and I showed them the film. It went completely silent. Then Eric said: “You do realise that I have to do everything from scratch now?” Then we laughed.
The result is the documentary From Darkness to Light, which premiered at the Venice Film Festival in 2024 and will come to Sweden this summer. Crispin knew that his secret would come out.
– All this time I have been terrified of getting caught for burglary so I have not said anything. There have been days when I have been convinced that the police will come and knock on my door.But he is not worried any more. He has spoken on the phone with his old boss and confessed his crime. He expected at least a scolding, maybe also the threat of being reported to the police. But none of that happened. It was a friendly conversation that ended with both men expressing gratitude for the film being saved, which would otherwise have been lost.
The film itself is not good, Hans Crispin agrees. His wish is that it will be included in the Lewis collection at the American Library of Congress as a historical document. Although he does not regret stealing the film, there is also a little sadness.
– The film gets worse the more people who see it.
What he means, of course, is that the myth loses its magic as the truth is revealed. And a myth is always more fun than the truth. Although the truth in this case is more thrilling than the movie will ever be.
