Future History

 

 

The Day the Clown Cried

The Day the Clown Cried is possibly the best film combining human tragedy and comedy you'll never get to see.

 

 

Filmed in 1972, The Day the Clown Cried was directed by and starred Jerry Lewis as a German circus clown named Helmut Doork who is sent to a Nazi prison and then a concentration camp, where he performers for wide-eyed Jewish children leading them to the gas chambers.  Still unreleased, the one existing copy lays locked in a secret vault by Lewis and safeguarded by legal bindings, the mystery surrounding the film has deepened and grown more tantalising with each passing decade.

 

During production, the producer not only ran out of money before completing the film, but his rights to produce the film expired before filming began.  He had paid the writer an initial fee (of $5,000), but failed to send her the remaining settlement (of $50,000) prior to production.  Lewis eventually ended up paying production costs with his own money to finish shooting the film, but the parties involved in its production were never able to come to terms allowing the film to be released.  Additionally the writers of the original script were unhappy with changes made by Lewis, which made the clown more sympathetic than the original  arrogant, self-centred character.  The film has been tied up in litigation ever since, and all of the parties involved have never been able to reach an agreeable settlement suspending the film in the abyss of international litigation.

 

 

 As research for the film, Lewis visited  the remains of Auschwitz and Dachau concentration camps and even managed an interview with one of the men who actually pulled the lever on the gas chamber. In the early 1970's The Day The Clown Cried met criticism because of its premise and content, however, the film does not actually make light of tragic events. With contemporary films such as Life Is Beautiful in 1997, the remake of Jakob the Liar in 1999, and Adam Resurrected in 2009, It becomes clear Lewis was genuinely decades ahead of his time. Jerry openly dislikes being asked about the film although, in a rare interview in last month on 19 Augusts 2013, Lewis did speak about the film. The interview can be found at Entertainment Weekly website.

 

Every decade or so rumours of a remake surface, often with high profile writers and producers entering into talks with both Robin Williams (no surprise there) and William Hurt (slight surprise there) being proposed lead actors at one stage or another.  Though so far the idea has always been dropped before it officially gets the green light for pre-production.  A copy of the script can be found at The Daily Script.

Heroic Anachronism

I'm not all that big on war stories and war heroes but Jack Churchill was the stuff of legends.

 

Rather than wield a rifle or sub-machine gun in battle, the commando leader inspired his comrades by storming beaches armed with a Scottish broadsword, a longbow, a kilt and a set of bagpipes.  Known as Mad Jack, he was very fond of saying "any officer who goes into action without his sword is improperly armed",  Lt Col Churchill’s fearlessness under fire became his hallmark and made both Robin Hood and Rambo look like sissy school girls.

 

Born John Malcolm Thorpe Fleming Churchill in Surrey in 1906, he was educated on the Isle of Man and at the Royal Military Academy at Sandhurst. He joined  the 2nd Battalion the Manchester Regiment in 1926.  He spent his first few years in the army learning to play the bagpipes, despite his lack of Scottish heritage, and riding his motorcycle across the entire Indian subcontinent just for the hell of it.  Jack later left the Army to pursue his bagpipe playing career.  In that time he also worked as a newspaper editor, a professional male model, represented Britain in the 1939 World Archery Championships and appeared in films. Probably because of a shortage of people hiring bagpipe musicians.

 

 

At the outbreak of the second world war he was recalled to the Army and posted in France just as Blitzkrieg was beginning and British troops were being pushed back towards the sea.  Well Mad Jack wasn't going to have any of that Jerry Blitzkrieg malarkey.  Jack launched small-scale guerrilla raids and surprise attacks on German positions and supply depots.  Riding his trusty motorcycle and armed only with a his longbow and and broadsword, he would assault the Germans medieval-style catching them completely off-guard.  Despite being shot in the neck by a machine gun, Mad Jack Churchill battled throughout the Dunkirk campaign, at one point even winning the Military Cross for bravery when he rescued a wounded British officer from a German ambush.

 

Jack returned to England and signed up to a new organisation known as the Commandos.  He wasn't sure what a Commando was, but it sounded like something he'd been waiting for.  His first mission was to lead the Number 2 Commandos to take out the artillery batteries on Maaloy Island, as part of the amphibious assault on the German base in Vaagso, Norway.   As the landing craft raced towards their LZ, he belted out "The March of the Cameron Men" on the bagpipes to inspire his men, probably alerting the Germans to the oncoming attack.  When the assault ramp swung open, he lead the charge at the head of his men, with his trusty sword in hand.  Two hours later, British High Command received a telegram from the front: "Maaloy battery and island captured.  Casualties slight.  Demolitions in progress.  Churchill."

 

 

He was also playing his bagpipes in the thick of the action while leading the 2 Commando through Sicily, to Messina and the landings at Salerno, Italy, where he won another award for bravery.  His squad was charged with taking out an artillery battery that was pinning down a nearby British force, despite the fact that it was garrisoned by a force much larger than his own.  Churchill  had his men charge the town from all sides in the middle of the night, screaming as loud as possible.  The Germans were surprised and confused, and offered poor resistance.  The 50 men of Number 2 Commando took 136 prisoners and inflicted an unknown number of casualties. Another night on the same campaign, he single-handedly took forty-two German prisoners and captured a mortar crew William Wallace style using only his broadsword, by taking one patrolling guard as a human shield and sneaking from sentry post to sentry post forcing the soldiers to surrender under threat of his sword.

 

Mad Jack was finally captured in an attack on the island of Brac, most of his unit had been killed and as bombs exploded around him, he continued to play his bagpipes until he was knocked unconscious by an explosion. The Germans took him to Sachsenhausen Concentration Camp. But it would take more than some Nazi concentration camp to hold Jack Churchill. One night in September of 1944, he escaped by crawling through and abandoned drain.  He was later recaptured while walking towards the Baltic coast and sent to a prison camp in Austria. This too would prove to be insufficient to hold the likes of Jack Churchill, for one night when the camp lighting failed in  April 1945, he simply walked away.  He marched 150 miles through the Alps, liberating vegetables he found along the way, until finally he met up with a U.S. Armoured division and was sent back to England.

 

By this time the war in Europe was more or less over, Jack expressed interest in fighting the Japanese, but as his train was pulling into the station in Burma he received word that the atomic bomb had been dropped on Hiroshima and the Pacific Campaign would soon be over. But still, Jack's adventures weren't finished yet.  At the age of 40, he qualified as a paratrooper and went on to see action in Palestine, where he earned fame for defending a Jewish medical convoy from an Arab ambush while wearing his full military dress uniform.  After Palestine, Churchill went on to serve as an instructor at a land-air warfare school in Australia and became an awesome surfer.  He even designed and built his own surfboards and eventually retired from the army in 1959 and died in 1996.

 

 

Lasssie-Bot

The Russians have been developing cold war, border collie battle cyborgs since the 1950's.  The project was shut down because the Lassie-Bots chase and retrieve when you throw a grenade.

 

Mostly Metal Jacket

I'm veering away from a monthly dose of misheard song lyrics.  But until I come up with something else, here's Mostly Metal Jacket, one of my favourite animutations, by a guy called Bill Volk.

 

Just in case you were wondering: the song is "Hubba Hubba Zoot Zoot" by Caramba.

Bunnies Revenge

This months book cover, I'm keeping it Easter...ish. Well bunny rabbits anyway.
Revenge of the Fluffy Bunnys by Craig Shaw Gardner (the author of Batman!)

Look at how awesome that book cover is. That would be Bambo screaming front and centre there.

Aided by his side kick Janis Hoplin, Bambo seeks to liberate his imprisoned comrades from the shampoo companies in South East Asia.  Along for the ride is a seedy short man in a pocketless trench coat and his grey haired dominatrix wife who both misread the mission brief regarding bunnies in chains.

Xmas Road Toal

Australia entered the Afghanistan War on October 7 2001.  Since that time 32 Australian soldiers have been killed over the past ten years serving in Afghanistan.  In contrast there has been 14598 Australians killed in car accidents over the same period.

What that means is, being an Australian soldier in a war zone is 456 times safer than being a civilian driving on an Australian road.  It probably has a lot to do with the fact that, despite the situation, Australian soldiers know what they're doing while half the drivers on the road don't have the slightest clue what they're doing.

Or maybe we should just all drive tanks.