Clowns and the Camps

Both Mona Edwards’ concern over the possibility that audiences will “misinterpret” the film “Life Is Beautiful” as a candy-coated version of the Holocaust (Letters, Feb. 28) and Danny Biederman’s belief that the film is “a life-affirming tale about the power of love” (Letters, March 7) are misplaced, though Edwards is much closer to the mark in at least sensing that something is dreadfully wrong here (besides a plot that hinges on acceptance of the idea that German prison camp guards never did bunk checks).

In the early ‘70s, Jerry Lewis realized a longtime dream by making a film about a circus clown who was interred at a death camp and forced by the Nazis to entertain Jewish children prior to their being gassed. Lewis had to finance it himself, because no studio would give him the money to make the movie. Subsequently, no distributor would touch it, and the film remains publicly unseen.

In the current instance, Roberto Benigni, in addition to being a physical comic who has made a Nazi death camp movie--in which he gives a performance that warrants arrest for assaulting an audience--displays several other striking resemblances to Jerry Lewis: a nonstop demand to be loved, an utter shamelessness in his use of an adorable moppet to demonstrate his goodness and cajole that love, and an ego of staggering proportions.

The message of “Life is Beautiful” is that if all those people killed by the Nazis had been as funny and clever and manipulative as Roberto Benigni, they, too, could have outsmarted the Holocaust. They could have saved their loved ones, and then they could be loved even more as sainted martyrs.

That a second-rate comic saw fit to use the Holocaust as the backdrop for his orgy of self-adulation is merely unfortunate. That this is being universally hailed as artistically daring and life-affirming and showered with awards is a barometer of how far the popular taste has fallen since studios and exhibitors refused to inflict Lewis’ similar effort upon us 30 years ago.

ANDREW CHRISTIE

Santa Monica