For some, it is his masterpiece. For others, it is unendurably and outrageously awful, an exercise in frantically broad slapstick comedy that inspires pure disbelief, as well as derision for those reported chin-strokers and ironic postmodernists in France and elsewhere who affect to admire it. The film is The Nutty Professor, from 1963, that wacky doppelgänger farce inspired by Jekyll and Hyde, co-written and directed by its legendary star… Jerry Lewis.

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Lewis was the knockabout zany clown, singer and showbusiness savant who started professional life in a double-act with lugubrious Dean Martin as his straight man, went solo and was for a while the biggest comedy star in Hollywood, with dozens of movies and hit records. But then he endured a fadeout, suddenly and utterly unfashionable and marooned at the end of the 60s by new fads and the New Wave. And his annual telethon in aid of the Muscular Dystrophy Association, which he presented for 45 years until 2012 and which raised $2bn for “Jerry’s Kids”, itself came to be regarded as wince-makingly schmaltzy and misjudged, marooned in an outdated ideas of pity and victimhood. But does that tell us the whole story about Jerry Lewis’s dark brilliance?

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Lewis with Stella Stevens in The Nutty Professor. Photograph: Allstar/PARAMOUNT

In The Nutty Professor, Lewis plays Professor Julius Kelp, a nerdy, buck-toothed, bespectacled chump who keeps blowing up his laboratory with his crazy chemical experiments. No woman could possibly find him attractive. But the hapless professor invents a potion that turns him into a super-sexy hipster, Buddy Love, who reduces women to a quivering jelly. And it is a bravura double performance: when he makes his first appearance as the groovy Buddy, Lewis’s face becomes eerily almost handsome, as if by force of will he has transformed himself into a cross between Dean Martin and Frank Sinatra. And Sinatra himself was no oil-painting. If only Lewis did not have the taste for comedy, he might have come to match Frank in the singing stakes.

But audiences and critics themselves found that Lewis’s own reputation was a divided personality. Was he just an embarrassment — or an inspired movie clown? Because, like the nutty professor, Lewis was an explosive experimenter with a dazzling skill, and an audacious, innovatory flair for the technique of the cinema. He knew how to frame and present his own adrenaline-fuelled, instinctive physical comedy for the camera, although probably the delirium of his live performance, which reduced packed Vegas showrooms to screams of laughter, would never entirely be captured on screen. Lewis was a dedicated artisan of the cinema, pioneering the process of video playback on set, without which directing a movie is now quite unthinkable. He taught a directing class at USC for some years, where his students included Spielberg and Lucas.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Jerry Lewis and Robert De Niro in The King of Comedy. Photograph: Allstar/20 CENTURY FOX

Later, in the early 1980s, he was superbly cast by Martin Scorsese in The King of Comedy, as the late-night talk show host who is kidnapped by an obsessive fan, played by Robert De Niro. Lewis plays utterly against type, but entirely with a different kind of Hollywood stereotype: the hard-faced, cynical and charmless showbusiness kingpin for whom comedy and celebrity are both wearisome, lucrative businesses from which the joy has long since been strip-mined. It was not a comeback as such, at least in part because the movie itself was not properly appreciated at the time. But Lewis had a sensational charisma. And he did, in his hatchet-faced way, present the metaphorical properties of his own reputation: bound and gagged by De Niro and his partner-in-crime, Sandra Bernhard, held hostage by a younger generation, who derided him, or admired him, or idolised him, but at all events made him mute, refused to let him be fashionable or accepted on his own terms.

And then, 10 years later, something even stranger happened in Lewis’ cultural history. In May 1992, Spy magazine, under the editorship of Graydon Carter, had the idea of trying to piece together what happened to a film which Jerry Lewis had half-made and then abandoned: a forgotten mess entitled The Day the Clown Cried, from 1972 — reportedly a horrendous mish-mash of pathos and bad taste, in which Lewis stars as a clown who is sent to a Nazi concentration camp and who, in a final desperate act of redemption and self-validation, attempts to cheer up the poor children there with his silly pratfalls and gurning as they are led to the gas chambers. When the truth of what he had done dawned on Lewis, he shut down the film, put existing prints and video copies in a vault and refused to let anyone see the footage, apart from a very few friends. (Some fragments have since surfaced online.)

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Spy magazine mischievously interviewed the surviving cast members and single-handedly made The Day the Clown Cried the biggest film maudit in cinema history — and inflated Lewis’s cult status even further. But then, five years later, Roberto Benigni had a massive hit with his Oscar-winning movie Life Is Beautiful, which had a similarly sucrose approach to the concentration camps. Peter Kassovitz’s Jakob the Liar in 1999, starring Robin Williams, struck a comparable note. And once again, onlookers asked themselves: could Lewis have been ahead of his time? Was there something daring, even magnificent, in his utter unawareness of good taste? A kind of primitivist genius, an art brut of the movie screen?

Well, Lewis himself never believed that, although he indulged the cult-worshippers with wry amusement. It’s worth pointing out that his partnership with Martin itself inspired one of the best American comic novels of the last decade, Funny Men (2002) by Ted Heller, in which Sigmund “Ziggy” Blissman (based on Lewis), is the wild man of comedy, whose talent is not properly understood by the public until he is teamed up with a laidback Italian singer Vic Fontana (based on Martin). It is a bitingly shrewd insight into Lewis’s own beginnings.

Has Lewis any inheritors in modern Hollywood comedy? Just occasionally Will Ferrell’s hyperactive creations have something of Lewis in them, but without his streak of sentimentality and need to be loved. Eddie Murphy remade The Nutty Professor, but his innate cool is something alien to the rather conservative Lewis. Watching Scorsese’s The King of Comedy is probably the closest we’ll come to appreciating the dark and melancholy inner life of Jerry Lewis, the clown for whom crying might come as a blessed relief.