Jerry Lewis in 2005. Photo: Wikipedia.

Scenes from a controversial never before released Jerry Lewis film are finally seeing the light of day, forty-one years after they were initially filmed, the BBC reported Monday.

The veteran actor and comedian canned the film “The Day The Clown Cried” after it was completed in 1972. In the film, Lewis plays a failed clown name Helmut Doork who, after being locked up in a Nazi camp for drunkenly mocking Adolf Hitler, is made to entertain Jewish children on their way to Auschwitz.

Speaking of the film at the Cannes Film Festival in May, Lewis told reporters: “No one will ever see it, because I’m embarrassed. I believed in the work and the way it should have been, and it wasn’t.”

According to the BBC, the footage apparently first surfaced on a Flemish website last year, has now been published on YouTube, and shows scenes of Lewis in clown costume giving backstage direction.

Watch the YouTube scenes of Jerry Lewis’s film below.