Once Is Not Enough (1975)

Thanks for the memories!

Powerful

I am only giving this movie a 1 for the great cast, though I can't imagine what any of them were thinking. This movie was horrible

Excellent and certainly provocative... If nothing else, the film is a real conversation starter.

Formerly influential Hollywood producer Mike Wayne (Douglas) dotes on his beautiful daughter January (Raffin) who is recovering in a Swiss clinic after a scandalous motorcycle accident caused by the leading man of his last movie.She was thrown and hit the wall of a villa high-speed falling to the ground like strand of under cooked spaghetti. After three years of the best health-care money can buy she can the 'restart' button on her life after it went haywire.With his finances strained Mike courts a wealthy lesbian Dee (Smith) evidently offering companionship and a beard of high society respectability. She accepts his hand in marriage asking only that he give up his career.Tensions naturally erupt. January has a bad case of the Elektra Complex and resents her stepmother - angst which serves to make a facile dork like her seem less facile.Dee, for her part, has a meticulous plan that January shall wed her cousin David (Hamilton) a womanizing cad and make a respectable man out of him polishing the standing of their not so noble house. Appearances are of the utmost importance to her even as, touched by love, she enjoys her Sapphic pair-bond with aging former movie actress Carla - her kept woman/girlfriend-on-retainer who happens to be a grade A creep i.e. a kindred spirit for Dee to snuggle with.These are absurd characters who summarize their lives with a few lines of silly expositional dialogue that clue the viewer in on how vile they are and what nasty habits they have. Whilst failing to properly establish these characters the narrative introduces more of them including misanthrope writer Tom Colt (Janssen) who is clearly a thinly disguised but overly romanticized version of Norman Mailer. Running out of time the film fails to adequately conclude any of the arcs or backstories.The gorgeous Deborah Raffin turned in some pretty appalling performances in her career. Doubtless her turn in this one was among the very worst any actress is capable of.Creepy Greek actress Melina Mercouri who gave a pretty distracted performance in her own right can perhaps be forgiven. She had spent the previous seven years under numerous credible death threats for criticizing the military dictatorship of her home country.Brenda Vaccaro received an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actress which she actually deserved for other work rather than the characterization she gave in this.Depictions of lesbian characters in cinema have certainly evolved in the decades since this film was made. The way they are depicted in this film offer justification for complaints of negative stereotyping.

Once Is Not Enough (1975)* (out of 4) I really hope the all-star cast got a good chunk of change to bring Jacqueline Susann's trashy novel to the screen. A burned out movie producer (Kirk Douglas) marries a billionaire (Alexis Smith) so that his virgin daughter (Deborah Raffin) can lead a good life. The daughter, who has some weird thing for daddy, gets jealous and moves out on the advice of a girlfriend (Brenda Vaccaro) who just happens to be "easy". Soon the daughter is courted by a playboy (George Hamilton) but soon she finds herself falling in love with an alcoholic writer (David Janssen) who hates her father because he ruined one of his plays. Did you catch all of that? I'll be honest and admit that I've never read the novel that this is based on and I'll admit upfront that I'm not at all familiar with Susann's work other than the reputation that it's trashy. With an all-star cast it's nearly impossible to stay away from this film and while all of the actors give strong performances you still can't help but scratch your head and wonder why such a talented cast would want to be involved with a film like this. The entire thing is just downright bizarre and it never really makes too much sense. The entire incest relationship between Douglas and Raffin is just downright creepy and it gets even worse when the "friend" suggests to the daughter that she should ask daddy to sleep with her. I can understand a girl saying that her daddy is her best friend but this film takes that a tad bit too far. The two love affairs that the daughter has are just as silly and the amount of melodrama thrown in makes me wonder what adult in their right mind would buy into it. It seems like not even a naive teenager would believe anything going on here so who exactly this film was meant for is beyond me. Clocking in at 121-minutes, this film goes from slow to slower and it just keeps getting worse. There's not a bit of pacing going on and the film just seems to go off in one direction after another. We start off thinking the film is going to be about Douglas but then it skips to the daughter and we get countless other characters that come in and out. What really kills this film is that the entire group of characters are just ugly people and it's impossible to care for any of them. It's not that a viewer can't enjoy ugly characters but the ones here are just so fake, so idiotic and so boring that you don't want to care with them. The shocking thing is seeing the cast give it their all and turn in fine work. Vaccaro picked up a Golden Globe win and she was nominated for an Oscar and she clearly steals the film and beings the only energy to the picture. Raffin is believable as the confused young woman and both Douglas and Smith are good in their parts. The supporting cast is strong but it really doesn't matter because the story is just so stupid and worthless.

This is a movie about a bunch of unattractive people, exhibiting behavior that is sometimes sleazy, sometimes insipid, but always boring. Deborah Raffin was the hottest thing in Hollywood when she got the lead in this movie. It is hard to understand why she was the flavor of the month from watching (or fast forwarding through) this movie.If one reads Jacqueline Susann's biography, it is easy to see that a large portion of the plot for this movie was taken either from her life or from those she knew in Hollywood. These individuals thought that they were living the "glamorous life" when in reality they were superficial, grasping, amoral cretins who did not have a clue on how to lead a life worthwhile.

Stunningly stupid movie. Young and beautiful January Wayne (Deborah Raffin) is crushed when her widowed father Mike (Kirk Douglas) marries rich Deidre Granger (Alexis Smith). It turns out that January has a thing for her father and hooks up with another older man (David Janssen) who her father hates. It also turns out Deidre is a lesbian and having an affair with the mysterious Karla (Melina Mercouri).OK Jacqueline Susann's book was hardly high art but it was a fun and trashy read. This movie sanitizes the book--all the sex is either cut out completely or off screen. Despite the R rating there's virtually no nudity--for some reason we only get to see Janssen's bare butt! Still it works. With the sole exception of Raffin the cast is very good. Douglas is OK; Smith looks gorgeous AND has fun with her role; Janssen is excellent in his part; Mercouri is only in one scene but she's fun and best of all is Brenda Vaccaro who was nominated for an Oscar here (!!!) as a sexually loose man-chaser. She grabs the movie, chews it up, spits it out and comes back for more! Her scenes are just great. Unfortunately Raffin is the lead here and she's beautiful--but lousy.This film wasn't a hit and disappeared pretty quickly. Still, out of all the Jacqueline Susann adaptations, this is easily the best. Faint praise I know but it's true. Worth catching--if you can. I give it a 7.