Send in the Clowns

A few months ago, poking around on the IMDB page for The Day the Clown Cried (that never-released object of ridicule that just won't go away), I noticed an unexpected name on the cast list: Serge Gainsbourg. What?! The glorious sleazebag of French pop found his way into a Jerry Lewis Holocaust movie? I tried to rationalize it—part of the movie was shot in Paris, where Gainsbourg lived, and in that same period (the early '70s) he did have small parts in awful movies like Seven Deaths in the Cat's Eye. But his girlfriend Jane Birkin was the star of Seven Deaths, so his being in it made sense, and there's no record anywhere else of him appearing in Clown. So it was obviously an IMDB prank, right? I needed to know for sure. I decided to plunk my own unlikely actor into the Clown cast list and see what would happen.

And that's how Orson Welles joined the cast of The Day the Clown Cried, playing an elusive American named Harry Lime. It's on his IMDB page, so it must be true.

POSTSCRIPT: It's a week later, and Welles is no longer on the Clown cast list. But Gainsbourg still is. Thoughts, anyone?