For Holocaust filmmakers, the inherent controversiality of the topic is often part of the draw to make the movie in the first place. Yet the backlash can still catch them off-guard, as it did when Jonathan Glazer accepted an Academy Award for last year’s The Zone of Interest and clumsily tried to draw an equivalence between the Nazis of World War II and the Israeli Jews of today.

Just as explaining a joke will usually ruin it, letting one’s film speak for itself is almost always the better move.

Unless, that is, the movie is so bad that the director insists on burying it forever like an artifact to be pursued into the dark corners of the earth by Indiana Jones.

That’s precisely what famed Jewish comedian and actor Jerry Lewis did. The Day the Clown Cried, filmed in 1972 in Sweden, is without a doubt the most controversial Holocaust movie ever made, despite (or perhaps because of) the fact that no one has ever seen it and no one ever will. Today, however, researchers will finally be able to see a bit more of it than ever before: Lewis donated clips and images from the movie to the Library of Congress with the proviso that they not be made available until 2024, and today is the day.

At a press conference in 2013, Lewis was asked if the public will ever see the movie. His response:

“No. Nope. You want to know why? Simply because it’s very easy to sit in front of an audience and expound on your feelings. It’s another thing to have to deal with those feelings. And in terms of that film, I was embarrassed. I was ashamed of the work, and I was grateful that I had the power to contain it all and never let anybody see it. It was bad, bad, bad. It could have been wonderful, but I slipped up. I didn’t quite get it. And I didn’t quite have enough sense to find out why I’m doing it.”

The plot of the movie was rather straightforward. A clown is arrested by the Nazis for making fun of Adolf Hitler. He’s sent to a concentration camp where he is required to lead children to the gas chambers.

We may still see the script filmed in some format: Producer Kia Jam says he has acquired rights to the original, pre-Lewis screenplay. But Lewis is the real draw: the legendary Jewish funnyman directing a Holocaust drama about a clown, combined with the fact that it was filmed and then buried, is the reason for the almost mythical stature of The Day the Clown Cried.

“The original story was a tale of horror, conceit, and finally, enlightenment and self-sacrifice,” script co-writer Charles Denton told JTA. Lewis apparently renamed the clown Helmut Doork. “Jerry had turned it into a sentimental, Chaplinesque representation of his own confused sense of himself, his art, his charity work, and his persecution at the hands of critics.”

According to Denton and his co-writer Joan O’Brien, the decision to keep it buried isn’t actually Lewis’s. By the time he shot the film, it’s not clear his producer still had rights to the script. Plus, O’Brien and Denton “were so horrified by the footage Lewis showed them that they refused to ever grant him, or any entities associated with him, the right to release it — a provision that still holds true today, despite all three parties having died.”

Which means the Library of Congress has limits on what it can release to the public. It does not have the full movie and it will not hold screenings or public exhibitions of what it does have. The materials Lewis gave the library can be viewed with permission by researchers.

The movie’s apparent terribleness is also part of the draw. Holocaust movies are about as rare as Abe Lincoln biographies: Though they can be very different from each other, the genre itself is always producing something. Even oddball takes on it break through. Just consider Quentin Tarantino’s vengeful revisionist bloodbath Inglourious Basterds (2009) and Taika Waititi’s satirical farce JoJo Rabbit (2019).

But a secret flop from a Jewish comedy megastar? There’s a reason it’s among the most famous movies never made. (Or, in this case, never released.) There’s been a ton of theorizing about what actually went wrong, but the writer Devorah Baum probably got it right when she told the BBC that Lewis may have just looked at the raw film he shot and thought, “actually, this wasn’t such a great idea.”