Looping the Loop (Arthur Robison, 1928)

 

Arthur Robison’s 1928 silent film Looping the Loop is never less than sturdy, and often captivating, rooted in a well-lived-in sense of circus life (it’s a sometimes disquietingly good source of footage of now-taboo sights such as performing bears and elephants). The film is capped by its protagonist Botto the clown, his white face and bald head and baggy clothes making an indelible visual impact, at once hilarious and poignant and somewhat unnerving, especially as his act involves a dummy that’s his exact double, and that in the film’s most nightmarish sequences appears to be the more alive of the two. Botto is consumed with the idea that a woman could never fall for a man she knew to be a clown, and therefore tells his younger love Blanche that he’s an engineer who has to work at night; despite all his efforts, she falls for a colleague of his, the acrobat Andre (Warwick Ward), enthusiastically depicted as one of the most single-minded and shameless horndogs in the history of film. The title refers to an ambitious set-piece into which Andre pulls the untrained Blanche as an assistant – one of the film’s most striking reveries (which would seem like a deliberate echo of King Kong if this movie hadn’t been there first) has a giant Botto towering over the apparatus, his fist clenching around the tiny Andre, before dropping him to the ground and crushing him underfoot. The film flags at times, but has a good feel for the limited choices available to women - Blanche’s parents all but push her into the arms of the blandly well-to-do engineer, her ultimate return to him appearing as much a fatigued strategic retreat as a heartfelt realization of where her heart lies - and a very enthusiastic performing dog, who unsurprisingly lands the closing shot.