“THE CITY OF ONE-NIGHT-STANDS”

By Raymond Benson

Alan Rudolph directed two forgotten horror flicks in the early seventies before joining Robert Altman’s team; he served as Altman’s assistant director and in other positions for several years. In the interim, Altman produced Rudolph’s third feature film, Welcome to L.A., which premiered in 1976 and was released to the general public in the spring of 1977.

Rudolph’s best work is obviously inspired by Altman’s method of telling the personal stories of an ensemble of quirky and neurotic characters over a sprawling canvas (M*A*S*H, Nashville, A Wedding, Short Cuts, for example). Rudolph’s Welcome to L.A. does just that, only this writer/director’s style is even more loosey-goosey than Altman’s. Rudolph’s approach is much more poetic, slower, and dreamier. More serious, too, I might add.

Keith Carradine plays Carroll, a character much like the guy he played in Nashville—a songwriter who is coolly arrogant and a cad, but all the women love him anyway. He’s been living in England when his agent and former lover, Susan (Viveca Lindfors), hooks him up with singer/musician Eric (Richard Baskin, who wrote all the film’s songs); so Carroll comes back home to L.A. He doesn’t get along with his millionaire father (Denver Pyle), but manages to seduce his father’s girlfriend, photographer (Lauren Hutton). Throw in the realtor of his rented house (Sally Kellerman), a seriously-disturbed and unhappy housewife (Geraldine Chaplin), and a wacky housekeeper who vacuums topless (Sissy Spacek), and we’ve got a real merry-go-round of one-night-stands (in fact, one of the songs beats us over the head that they’re “living in the city of the one-night-stands”).

There are other men, too—Harvey Keitel is quite good as Chaplin’s husband, who happens to work for Pyle and has his sights set on some co-stars, and John Considine, who is married to Kellerman—he, too, manages to have dalliances with other female cast members. The entire movie’s “plot,” as it were, is how all of these characters will hook up with the others in the space of a few days.

But what the movie is really about is loneliness. These people are middle-to-upper-class Hollywood types and they’re caught in the malaise that Los Angeles of the mid-seventies had become (and Rudolph’s filmmaking smacks of the 1970s in look and feel—not that this is a bad thing). The picture seems to be saying that even if you’re rich and beautiful/handsome and talented, you still need love and connection—but unfortunately, the one-night-stand mentality is a dead end, as many of the characters learn. And Carradine’s character, something of an omniscient angel/devil, floats through this world caring about nothing but himself, but therein lies a central truth—this guy is the unhappiest of them all.

The film is beautifully shot, and if you can get past the somewhat now-pretentious and arty device of people looking into mirrors and delivering soliloquies, you may be impressed with the mise-en-scene. Some folks, I remember, criticized Baskin’s songs and singing as being annoying; on the contrary, I’ve always found the movie’s soundtrack to be very well done. After all, the point of the picture is that it’s a musical journey through vignettes that dramatize the lonely search for interconnection.

The film is available as an MGM burn-to-order title. A card before the movie claims that the transfer was made from the “best sources possible,” which means they probably used an existing print rather than negatives to strike the DVD. Colors have faded significantly and the image looks rather drab, which is unfortunate.

Nevertheless, if you’re a fan of Rudolph, or Altman, and you want to experience something different that was hitting the art house circuit in the mid-seventies, take a look. I would place Welcome to L.A. near the top of Alan Rudolph’s idiosyncratic, but usually quite interesting, work.