Looping the Loop.

Werner Krauss

I’ve been trying to see Looping the Loop all my adult life. There was reputed to be an original copy in local distributor Jerry Taylor’s storeroom, along with his print of Pabst’s Secrets of a Soul, the tinted Metropolis, which proved to have the last copy of the stadium scene and the believed-lost Murnau Faust, on which a negative was later found, though it didn’t have the mottled fire effect added in the printing stage. Before one of the BFI’s people had gone to Australia, I drew his attention to these and when he came back I asked what he’d found. 

He proudly produced a photocopy of the score to The Sentimental Bloke.

Golden Memories! 

1928’s Die Todesschleife/Looping the Loop finally proves to be an ambitious example of the great Weimar German films. It stars Werner Krauss, possibly their leading actor (whose Iago you can see upstaging Emil Jannings in the 1922 Buchowetsky Othello)  with Warwick Ward from Variety and The Great Love of Nina Petrovna, busy Jenny Jugo and even sultry Gina Manés (Josephine in Gance’s’ Napoléon and splendidly bitchy in Duvivier’s La tete d’un homme - she’s wasted here). Throw in the cameraman of Metropolis and the designers of The Last Laugh & Congress Dances working from a script by Robert Liebmann (Congress Dances), Robert Reinert (Opium) and the film’s director, Arthur Robison. This one sounded like a vintage film freak’s pipe dream.

Krauss as Botto.

We open with the well-dressed public mixing with dancing girls, stick walkers and a live bear, backstage at the multi tiered circus auditorium, like the one in Variety or the 1949 French Portrait d’un assassin, which is a part remake of this. Botto the Clown/Krauss turns down a double date with his friend, tightrope walker Ward, still stung by his derisive rejection by a glamorous carriage trade woman when she found he was only a circus clown - "You cannot love a man you laugh at.” The section of Krauss’ circus performance that we see is unimpressive.

The movies of the day were full of broken-hearted clowns - Ivan Mozjoukine in House of Mystery, Lon Chaney in Tod Browning’s The Show, Herbert Brennon ’s Laugh Clown Laugh and Victor Seastrom’s great He Who Get’s Slapped and, well into the sound period, Karl Grune did a Richard Tauber Pagliacci in the UK.

Warwick Ward & Jenny Hugo

Here, Ward is a ladies' man - more plausibly than in some of his other films. It was interesting to see his Lothario persona could be made over for hero parts, as in Maurice Elvey’s excellent 1926 Woman Tempted.

This is already a bit thin. Warwick has nice girl Jenny Jugo in tow but her aunt and uncle, Lydia Potechina and Max Gülstorff with their bourgeois values, lock her out for exceeding their curfew, so Werner, understandably smitten, puts her up on the couch, warning all (including handler & later Hollywood regular Sig Arno) never to let her know he’s not an engineer who works nights.

The deception looks like coming unstuck when, instead of using the opera ticket Werner provided her as the relationship progressed, Jenny spots the poster for Warwick's new Looping the Loop routine and goes to the circus where he is starring with partner Gina. There, Werner is in Botto make-up. Warwick declares himself devoted to Jenny and multiple misunderstandings mean she sets off to be his London assistant in the elaborate routine for which promoters have constructed a three-storey rig.  In what has so far been a not too involving production, the tension picks up.

 Werner (and his small performing dog, quarantine not an issue) follow and he signs up as Botto. Despite Warwick’s failed rehearsal with a net, the show goes on. Even here, the actual Looping the loop effect is unconvincing.

There’s no lack of ambition. The film runs two hours and the large sets are thronged with costumed extras in the manner of Murnau's The Last Laugh. Cars drive on the indoor road like the Joe May Asphalt. There is a nightmare like Pabst's Secrets of a Soul and a journey like Jannings’ Mephisto showing the world to Gosta Eckman’s Faust as they fly, except here it’s the Channel crossing with locomotive wheels intercut with model shots incorporating a turntable not unlike the one that Fleischer cartoons would flaunt as Three Dimensional patent.

Arthur Robison is one of the less regarded filmmakers from this tradition, though his Fritz Kortner film Warning Shadows gets some action and he managed an impressive The Informer with Lars Hanson in the Gypo Nolan part.  Looping the Loop is a must-see. It is full of “Wow, look at that!” moments. Robison employs the exceptional film craft of the cycle with some style - reflections create framed images within images, characters’ faces are stacked by placing them on a staircase, emphasising screen height. One remarkable shot uses the car’s rear-view mirror against early back projection, to simulate car travel.

However, the film comes as an anti-climax. After discovering all this heavyweight talent, you expect something more imposing.  Botto the Clown offers a low-stakes game in the company of Emil Jannings going mad, Drs. Jekyll & Caligari, Iago, Faust, Jack the Ripper and Ivan the Terrible.

There is a story of the surviving copy having been put together from second takes, which would account for the occasional awkward cut. The YouTube presentation is derived from a 2007 reconstruction. It is is too bright, not tinted and slightly too fast but it is sharp and has good detail, excellent score and English subtitles.  It is a lot better than those of most of the vintage movies we are offered. 

Find it at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fd1lPWhxzfg

Barrie Pattison 2026.