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Actor-director Jerry Lewis, left, in a screen capture from his unreleased 1972 film "The Day the Clown Cried."

Updated on June 17: The video was removed from Vimeo.

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Jerry Lewis' Holocaust drama "The Day the Clown Cried" has remained unseen since the actor-director abandoned it in 1973 - until now.

A Vimeo user has posted a 31-minute condensed version of "The Day the Clown Cried" using footage shot by Lewis, script extracts and re-enactments. Some of the footage was apparently lifted from a recent German documentary "Der Clown."

Lewis directed and starred in the film about a circus clown, Helmut Doork, who is imprisoned in a Nazi concentration camp, where he entertains the children. He chose to never release the film and seldom talks about it.

Shot in Sweden and Paris in 1972, Lewis was expected to present the movie at the Cannes Film Festival in May 1973, but that never happened. Lewis was reportedly embarrassed by how the movie had turned out.

Harry Shearer, one of the few people to have seen the film, told Spy magazine in 1992 "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."

However, the Vimeo footage leads viewers to believe Shearer was a bit too harsh in his judgment. The subject matter may make some uneasy, but Lewis gives a surprisingly restrained performance.

The condensed version was posted on Vimeo two months ago, though its existence was only recently publicized by Hollywood Elsewhere blogger Jeffrey Wells.

"I don't see what's so godawful about it. Yes, the scheme is manipulative bordering on the grotesque -- Lewis as a German-Jewish clown in a Nazi concentration camp who's ordered in the final act to amuse a group of children being sent to the 'showers' -- but that elephant aside it didn't strike me as all that arduous or offensive," Wells wrote.

Last year, Lewis donated "The Day the Clown Cried" to the Library of Congress as part of a larger collection with the proviso it could not be screened for at least 10 years.

In a 2013 interview with Entertainment Weekly, Lewis explained his reason for tackling the script by Joan O'Brien and Charles Denton.

"I thought when I read it, This is not your bag. Well, yes it is! I was still fairly young at the time. But not so young that I didn't get that thing that all men must get some time: the decision to either be a part of something that should be spoken or not," Lewis said." "My Judaism has always been a great pride with me. But it felt like such a challenge. That sounds so trite. But a challenge to show people that there's more to me than that.