But a completed film never emerged, and its legend grew. Lawsuits and debts had apparently doomed it to perpetual limbo. Lewis seems to have retained only partial negatives, telling his son Chris that the remainder might be somewhere in France and Sweden.

Nonetheless, Jerry Lewis made a rough cut early on, and every so often, reports of a screening surface. In a 1992 article in Spy magazine, the comedian Harry Shearer said he saw a cut in 1979.

“This movie is so drastically wrong,” Shearer said, “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.”

In 2016, a 30-minute sample was leaked online. The next year, Vanity Fair published an interview with a French film critic, Jean-Michel Frodon, who said he saw a cut in the early 2000s. (He admired it.) Chris Lewis said he saw it in the early 1970s but does not know what happened to it.

“I can’t say I remember it being really great,” he said.

Jerry Lewis gave mixed signals about his desires for “Clown” throughout his life. In a 1982 autobiography, he wrote that “the picture must be seen.” In 2013, he told an audience at Cannes that “no one will ever see it, because I am embarrassed at the poor work.”

Still, rumors have kept fans optimistic. When the Library of Congress acquired Lewis’s personal archive in 2015, an article in the Los Angeles Times, citing the library’s moving-image curator, Rob Stone, indicated that the library had whole negatives but had agreed not to release them until 2024.