Alan Rudolph began his career as an assistant to Altman on The Long Goodbye, California Split, and Nashville. He later carved a path of his own with Welcome to L.A. (1977), which Altman produced, and Remember my Name (1979).
Like his mentor, Rudolph operates well with tight budgets and a repertory troupe of actors, some of whom– Keith Carradine, Genevieve Bujold, Geraldine Chaplin–have also worked for Altman.
Rudolph has an undeniably singular romantic vision. In his films, nothing is ever ordinary, and many of his characters are dreamers, real and delusional.
Best known for his offbeat romantic comedies, Rudolph is an iconoclastic filmmaker who revels in subverting traditional genres.
His work is marked by oddly eccentric moods, oblique entrances, elliptic passages, and archetypal characters. A director with a sophisticated visual sense, Rudolph presumably makes art movies for the intellectual crowd. His style is fanciful, whimsical–and occasionally frivolous.
Pauline Kael has observed that it’s often hard to distinguish in a Rudolph picture the intentional humor from the unintentional flightiness.
Welcome to L.A. (1977)
Rudolph’s first feature, Welcome to L.A., made in 1976 but receiving limited release a year later, displays his characteristic mood of romantic despair.
The narrative utilizes a La Ronde-like circle of social encounters, sexual adventures. and failed affairs centered around song-writer Carroll Barber, played by the handsome actor Keith Carradine, who may serve as Rudolph’s alter-ego.
Barber is an aloof and immature womanizer, who cannot commit or love one woman, and Rudolph uses his character as a commentary on the supposedly prevalent alienation and loneliness inherent in big-city life like contemporary Los Angeles.
Ensemble-Driven
Celebrity musician Eric Wood (Richard Baskin) plans to record an album of songs written by Carroll Barber (Carradine), who has been living in England.
Carroll’s aging manager Susan Moore (Viveca Lindfors) brings Carroll to Los Angeles for the recording sessions, and rents him a house from real estate agent Ann Goode (Sally Kellerman).
Ann is unhappily married to furniture store owner Jack Goode (John Considine), who is pursuing their young housemaid, Linda Murray (Sissy Spacek).
Linda in turn wants a relationship with her friend Kenneth “Ken” Hood (Harvey Keitel), a married young executive.
Like his mentor, Robert Altman, Rudolph gets good performances from Sally Kellerman as a lonely real estate agent, Geraldine Chaplin, as a Valley housewife addicted to taxi rides, and Lauren Hutton as the mistress of a wealthy man. But he carries the loosely structured, semi-improvised tale to a rambling and unpleasant extreme.
The film’s best element is the atmospherically haunting score by Richard Baskin.
Rudolph’s films have never been successful at the box-office (his audiences, largely urban, have been small), but they don’t cost much either.
The only exception is the ambitious Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle, a big-party movie about the legendary literary wits of New York’s Algonquin Round Table, and Rudolph’s most expensive ($7 million) film. Producer Altman managed to raise the funds with great difficulty, but the picture lost a bundle.
It took seven years and four movies for Rudolph to find his style in Choose Me (1983), a giddy movie which is still the crown of his achievements. Structured as a lyrical fantasy, its characters wander in and out of a bar called Eve’s Lounge, obsessively looking for love. The protagonist (David Carradine), a lunatic who radiates danger, turns out to be saner than anyone else. All the characters are at least vaguely amnesiac, and, as Kael noted, are given to dialogue that’s “over-intellectualized in a hammy way.” But the movie’s loose, choreographic flow and swoony camera fits its romantic ambience and compensate for the weaknesses.
American audiences have not embraced adult fairy tales in the way European audiences have. The chic, subtle and bizarre Choose Me is a variation on Schnitzler’s classic, La Ronde, set in a downtown L.A. where, with the exception of a few prostitutes, other people have vanished. A deceptively fragile movie, it owes a lot to Altman’s artful heedlessness: The fable about oddball lovers whose madness’s and illusions interlock is both subversive and upbeat. Rudolph’s finest achievement as a moody romantic melodrama, Choose Me boasts sinuously lurid visuals and a jazzy score.
