The Day the Clown Died

Apparently the most legendary film that was never released from Hollywood was Jerry Lewis' The Day the Clown Died:

...the film’s story told of Helmut Doork, a circus clown in Nazi Germany who has recently been fired. Doork gets drunk at a local bar, pokes fun at Hitler, and is taken to prison camp. After his act bombs with his fellow prisoners, Doork goes out alone to the prison yard and tries out his shtick. There, he overhears some children laughing at him.

Doork is given the job of putting new prisoners on the train to Auschwitz, the Nazi concentration camp. Like the Pied Piper, he leads a group of children on to the train; at the film’s conclusion, he leads kids to their death in the gas chamber. He goes to entertain the kids, but feels remorse, so he steps inside the gas chamber to join them. The movie ends with Doork inside the gas chamber, the children laughing with him.

Jesus Christ.  That's the saddest thuing I've ever heard - if that could actually be made into a movie, wouldn't that be the most moving film ever?

But it never got made, thanks to the usual story of producers and money disappearing and Lewis starting to spend his own money, until finances and the usual series of lawsuits ensured that while a rough cut would be stored in someone's mother's garage forever, the film would never be released, even though Lewis had put his health on the line for it:

"I almost had a heart attack," Lewis told The New York Times shortly after finishing the shoot.  "Maybe I'd have survived.  Just.  But if that picture had been left incomplete, it would have very nearly killed me ... The suffering, the hell I went through with Wachsberger had one advantage. I put all the pain on the screen." 

Including what must have been an incredibly tortuous final scene:

"I had been 113 days on the picture, with only three hours of sleep a night ... I was exhausted, beaten.  When I thought of doing that scene, I was paralyzed;  I couldn't move. I stood there in my clown's costume, with the cameras ready.  Suddenly the children were all around me, unasked, undirected, and they clung to my arms and legs, they looked up at me so trustingly.   I felt love pouring out of me. I thought, 'This is what my whole life has been leading up to.'  I thought what the clown thought.  I forgot about trying to direct.  I had the cameras turn and  I began to walk, with the children clinging to me, singing, into the gas ovens.  And the door closed behind us."

I can't believe this movie can't come out.  I get choked up watching Remember the Titans; after watching this one they'll hafta carry me out of the theater and wring me out like a rag.  And don't mean because of the usual 11 pounds of melted butter.  Jeez.