| Welcome To L.A. | |
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| Directed by | Alan Rudolph |
| Produced by | Robert Altman Scott Bushnell Robert Eggenweiler |
| Written by | Alan Rudolph |
| Starring | Keith Carradine Geraldine Chaplin Sally Kellerman Harvey Keitel Lauren Hutton Viveca Lindfors Sissy Spacek Denver Pyle Richard Baskin |
| Release date(s) | 12 November 1976 Washington, Seattle Premiere 10 March 1977 New York City |
| Running time | 106 Min |
| Language | English |
Welcome to L.A. is a 1976 film directed by Alan Rudolph and starring Keith Carradine.
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The theme of romantic despair and shallowness is displayed utilizing a La Ronde-like circle of sexual adventures and failed affairs centered around songwriter Carroll Barber, played by Keith Carradine, which spread out through the city. Barber is an aloof womanizer who cannot commit or love and is used by Alan Rudolph to illustrate the loneliness inherent in big-city life. The film features a continual score by Richard Baskin, present throughout, and features among its cast Sally Kellerman as a lonely real estate agent, Geraldine Chaplin, as a Valley housewife addicted to taxi rides, Lauren Hutton as the mistress of a wealthy man (Carroll's father), Sissy Spacek as a southern housekeeper, and Harvey Keitel as a troubled business man.
Carradine's character is a songwriter of mediocre talent, who is nonetheless supported financially, with enthusiasm, by his wealthy father Denver Pyle. An inveterate womanizer, he has affairs with Kellerman, the real estate agent who found his apartment, and whose husband, a successful businessman, covets their maid (Spacek). He also beds Chaplin, the wife of Keitel, who is the C.O.O. of his dad's successful dairy business. Keitel fancies Kellerman. He also includes his father's mistress (Hutton) among his conquests. Kellerman sends her maid, Spacek, to clean his apartment, which she does "topless." However, despite this, theirs is the only male-female relationship in the film which is platonic, and although weird, in the context of this story, the most "normal."
Jack Kroll of Newsweek described the film as an "extraordinary debut" for Rudolph, continuing that the director "does a remarkable job of weaving this gallery of neurotics into a vivid pattern of sharp, distilled performances." Kroll also considered Rudolph's work with Robert Altman, "he's gone beyond even Altman's example in shaping a film from a total design concept." Furthermore he praised Rudolph for creating a "Los Angeles that's shimmering Xanadu of psychic uncertainty. Mirrors reassemble people into soulless human collages. The swoosh of Hutton's ever-present Nikon sounds like a little guillotine beheading reality. The quavering cadences of Baskin's music evoke both the sweetness and self-indulgence of Carroll Barber. Cinematographer Dave Myers works like the new realist painters, capturing a metropolis of burnished surfaces that seems to dissolve the will in an amber nullity of light."[1]
Geraldine Chaplin was nominated for a British Academy Film Award for Best Supporting Actress.
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