Jared AxelrodWriter of Adventure

Few filmmakers have affected me like Raja Loreddex. With the new Criterion collection of his self-described “superhero films” having just come out, it’s an excellent time to re-examine the filmmaker’s body of work. Never a critical success, Loreddex created unique genre films, studies of secret identities, of powerful individuals, and of battles between good and evil. While clearly a fan of comicbooks, Loreddex never made a “proper” comicbook movie, though he was offered the opportunity to direct the failed SUPERMAN LIVES in 1996. Loreddex declined in order to work on GONE, his greatest, and last, film.

I’ve always been interested in Lorreddex, ever since my first viewing of a midnight showing of MAN ALIVE.  His films, I believe, show how superheroes can make the jump from comics to cinema. With so many superhero films bogged down with the details, there’s alot to learn from Raja Lorredex’s heroes, and who they are.

SPOILERS below, natch.

Fire Foxes

Loreddex’s first film was a commercial success, mainly due to it’s leading lady, a then-unknown Getrude Waith spending most of her screen time in either a bikini or a series of similarly miniscule tank tops. FIRE FOXES was marketed as a sexploitation biker movie, in which Waith and her similarly attired co-stars, Angel Herrida and Margaret Yun, seek to take down the evil Emporatrix, played with much relish and black leather by Cynthia Dunhill. But while there’s plenty of cleavage on display, Loreddex has crafted a much more complex film than it at first appears. The film is noteworthy in that there is no male cast members; even the boy that Waith begrudging befriends halfway through the picture is revealed to be a young Alice Keircox, in her first film role. Lorredex apparently took Caspar Weinman’s script–which originally had one female role–and swapped all the genders.

FIRE FOXES also begins what would become a Loreddex trademark: protagonists with no real names. Waith’s character refers to herself as Dinah, Suzie, Blake, Hannah and Rose, through out the film. None are said to be her actual name. When Keircox-who’s character is simply called “Boy,” even after the reveal–asks Waith her name, she receives no answer. Waith’s flexible indentity carries over in her performance: off her bike, Waith is bubbly, friendly, a charmer. But once on the motorcycle, or engaged in one of the film’s expertly staged fist-fights, Waith’s face grows cold.

FIRE FOXES is not a perfect film–the motorcycle stunts had to be done at a distance, as Waith could barely ride one, and a female stunt rider could not be found, and they suffer for it. Though ostensibly a ensemble film, Herrida and Yun have little to do but look good in tank tops, and have no real characters to speak of. Keircox and Dunhill’s characters are little more than mirrors to Waith, showing her who she was and who she may become. But as a study into one woman’s sense of who she is, it’s one of cinema’s most fascinating.

The Young Physician

The success of FIRE FOXES gave Loreddex a degree of studio autonomy, which may be why so many critics refer to THE YOUNG PHYSICIAN as oblique. Loreddex was a huge fan of both Doctor Who and Doctor Strange, so it is no surprise that in a film about magic, our main wizard is a doctor.

Stage magician Micky Cue plays another one of Loreddex’s nameless protagonists, referred to by the other characters only by “Doctor.” “Why is movie magic never as convincing as  stage magic?” Loreddex said in an interview about the film. “The most expensive special effect in the world is never as convincing a skilled pair of hands with a deck of cards.” It should come as no surprise then, that Loreddex gives Cue extensive creative credit with the film. The Doctor character was based on Cue’s stage persona–as it says in the opening titles–and it gives Cue a natural comfortability in the film. Despite the bizarre nature of the film, Cue grounds it with a effortlessly charismatic performance.

The film itself is one that requires repeated viewings. The chronology of the film is purposefully fractured and jagged, as the final scene brilliantly reveals, but it makes for a rough going the first time through. The magic that Cue creates are either taken directly from his stage act, or done through careful out-of-frame adjustments to the scene. In the film’s most lauded scene, Cue succeeds in transforming a house by walking through it, turning a farm house into a mansion, then a castle, then a mountain, and then make it disappear. The whole thing is one long steadicam take. The shot required an immense custom-built set that took months to build, and the shot itself took three days and a crew of 47 to get right.

This seems like a lot of work–there had to have been a simpler way, certainly with multiple cuts–but it fits the theme of the film. Loreddex and Cue’s wizard is constantly at war with unseen forces, be they the expectations of the people around him, or grand cosmic evil. To have every magical moment be the result of not an illusion, but of an outside hand, creates an uneasy feeling that permeates the film. After that long transformative shot, Cue stands in the middle of nowhere and breathes a sigh of relief, as do we.

Cue’s wizard has frequently been referred to as an enigma, but if you watch his scenes in reverse order–there was a series of YouTube videos that did just that, but they appear to have been taken down–it’s quite clear that Cue does have an impressive character arc. Cue goes from callow youth to the hero everyone expects him to be, and while his sacrifices appear meaningless, it’s just another bit of slight of hand.

Man Alive

Loreddex referred to MAN ALIVE as “my straight action picture.” The humor in this is clear, since despite it’s traditional action movie elements–a damsel in distress, a mustache-twisting villain who actually twists his mustache, a protagonist with a real name–MAN ALIVE is anything but a straight action movie. Even after you take away the fact that hero is gay.

Loreddex starts the film by showing us that, yes, his main character has a real name. Action star Ronald Stark plays Jim Stance, something that is driven home by a credit sequence consisting of series of ID papers, from a birth certificate to report cards to a series of driver licenses from series of states. The sequence ends with a death certificate, zooms in on the date, before starting our story 3 days before.

All of this, we learn, is meaningless. As the film goes on, “Jim Stance” proves just nameless as any other Loreddex hero, discarding identities has he needs. Stark’s “Stance” isn’t Stance at all–he has stolen Jim Stance’s identity in order to gain entry into a underground “to the death” fight tournament. As Stark fights one colorfully costumed opponent after another, it becomes clear that his chameleon-like nature extends to more than just forging papers. Stark mimics the fighting styles of his opponents, effectively beating them at their own game.

Stark’s character here is similar to Waith’s in FIRE FOXES (Waith even has a small scene, as Stark’s equally combative sister). But where the other charactes in FIRE FOXES act as mirrors of Waith, here it is Stark who is the mirror, becoming who the other characters want him to be in order to get the job done. In addition to being a commentary on the blankness of cinema action heroes, and of the personality-subliminnating nature of war, MAN ALIVE does work on a “straight action film” level.

Provided you miss the final scene, where hero and villain kiss for what has to be the longest guy-on-guy make-out session in cinema history.

The Astonishers

Much as MAN ALIVE attempted the normal in order to subvert it, THE ASTONISHERS brings another genre–the murder mystery–into Loreddex-ville.  The titular Astonishers, a pair of psychic detectives, are again, not given names. I recently purchased a copy of the script to find that the characters are referred to only by the colors of their shirts. “Red” and “Blue” seek to find out who murdered “Yellow,” and so on.

What’s fascinating about THE ASTONISHERS is how quickly the crime gets solved. Red and Blue, played by blind actor Adrian Tomalous and a grown-up Alice Keircox, solve the crime in the second scene, and Loreddex let’s the fall-out of the discovery of the murderer breathe in ways that most mystery movies avoid. Being psychics, our heroes have “skipped to the end,” as Keircox puts it, and in researching the hows and whys of the crime, they become less convinced by the man who the know committed the murder.

THE ASTONISHERS is the most lighthearted of any Loreddex film, and involves many actors from his previous films in small cameo roles–Waith and Stark are particularly hilarious as a pair of incompetent cops. Tomalous and Keircox give great performances, evoking William Powel and Myrna Loy from THE THIN MAN. But it’s not all froth; Loreddex themes of the nature of identity and responsibilites of the individual run through the whole film. This is most notably seen through the use of a photograph that the audience never sees, but affects the character each in a profoundly emotional way. The heartbreaking scene when Tomalous holds the picture and cannot see what’s effecting everyone is start contrast to the humor that surrounds it. But I can’t imagine the movie without it.

Loreddex had said that sequel to the THE ASTONISHERS was going to be his next film, after GONE.

Gone

…and then there’s GONE. Man, when I first saw this film, it damn near blew my head off.

Avery Gooding plays a man who is named Callahan Gone in the end credits, but in true Loreddex fashion, no one calls him that.  The only reference we get to it is Gooding’s tendancy to say “I’m gone” right before leaving. Which is as good a title as any, really.  For a constant traveler through space, being Gone is as good as anything else.

On first veiwing, GONE seems like a series of veinettes. Gooding shows up in some sort of sci-fi setting–a bar, a city, a farm, a school, a ship–and after encountering the trouble no one dares rise up against, puts it down. It’s almost a catch-all, as if Lorredex had set ideas for half a dozen sci-fi films, and instead of choosing one, made them all. But through these scenes, and the dialogue free, high-contrast black and white flashbacks that occur between them, we get a clear picture of Gooding’s hero. Despite the most impressive set design of any Lorredex film, it’s ultimately a very private film about the man in the middle of them.

Gooding gives a nuanced performance as a man who stands up to injustice in the future becuase he could not in the past. The flashbacks lack the stylized costume and sets of the color scenes; despite the lack of aging in Gooding, it’s quite clear that they represent the present. Gooding is, in a sense, an immortal hero, a wandering cowboy. Presumable he has a spacehip, but we never see it.  He just walks in.

The final twenty minutes of the film reaches the trascendental, as the director who refused visual effects for THE YOUNG PHYSICIAN appears to making up for lost time. Gooding ends up challenging a member of the “angel race,” played by jazz luminary Kepri Atum, and the final battle puts most science fiction films to shame. The resolution of which is one of the most indelible moments in cinema, where Gooding litterally walks out of the universe into another, more colorful one. It evokes the classic western motif of riding off into the sunset, but recreates it as only Loreddex could.

Raja Lorredex did not create superheroes in the tradition sense. None of them wore spandex costumes, though they all had distinctive styles of dress. Though their identities were often obfuscated, none wore masks. Some had fantastic abilities, but none were visually dynamic. While Lorredex clearly loved traditional superheroes in comics, he had no interest in translating them litterally to film.

In his last interview, Lorredex once again defended his choice of calling his films superhero films. “If you’re a superhero, you can do anything. If you’re telling a superhero story, you can do anything. It’s the only genre that swallows all the others. I’m suprised more people don’t do them, quite frankly.”