Welcome to LA

Plot

The theme of romantic despair and shallowness is displayed utilizing a La Ronde-like circle of sexual adventures and failed affairs around songwriter Carroll Barber (Carradine), which spread out through the city. Barber is an aloof womanizer who cannot commit or love and is used to illustrate the loneliness inherent in big-city life.

The film features a continual score by Richard Baskin, present throughout, and features a lonely real estate agent (Sally Kellerman), a Valley housewife addicted to taxi rides (Geraldine Chaplin), the mistress of Barber's father (Lauren Hutton), a housekeeper who vacuums topless (Sissy Spacek) and a troubled businessman (Harvey Keitel).

Barber 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 the real estate agent who found his apartment, and whose husband, a successful businessman, covets their maid. He also beds the wife of the businessman, who is the C.O.O. of his dad's successful dairy. Barber even includes his father's mistress among his conquests.

Cast

Critical reception

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."

Geraldine Chaplin was nominated for a British Academy Film Award for Best Supporting Actress.