Jason Daniel Baker 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.

bkoganbing Once Is Not Enough is one of those films with the built in audience who were devoted followers of the works of Jacqueline Susann's. In fact to insure the fans of Jackie knew this film was about her book her name was worked into the title when released. Some might argue that the film was inflicted.But to be fair the movie-going public knew this was trash going in and the cast knew this was trash as they spoke their lines with various degrees of conviction. One of the cast Brenda Vaccaro did it with so much conviction that she wound up with a nomination for Best Supporting Actress, but lost to Lee Grant for Shampoo. Vaccaro does add quite a bit of zip to the film as the cheerfully hedonistic friend of protagonist Deborah Raffin. Jackie Susann clearly took that aspect of the film from Marjorie Morningstar and what Herman Wouk wrote in his novel and what was shown on film between Natalie Wood and Carolyn Jones.Kirk Douglas plays an aging over the hill producer whose daughter Raffin had been in rehab for many years due to head injuries. She's now coming out and Douglas to provide for her and not incidentally to maybe get financing for his future projects becomes the latest of a string of husbands to billionairess Alexis Smith. In the days of gay liberation it might not be understood, but what Smith wants is a what we used to call a beard. Her real passion is movie queen Merlina Mercouri whom we see too little of in Once Is Not Enough. I can't quite believe that Douglas is that big a fool that he doesn't realize he's married to a lesbian. It would have made more sense to have that part of the novel and film up front.As for Raffin when sparks don't ignite between her and playboy cousin of Smith's George Hamilton she takes up with boozy over the hill novelist David Janssen. That doesn't sit well with Douglas who can't stand the guy, probably because except for the drink he sees too much of himself in Janssen. It threatens the daddy's little girl relationship he has with Raffin which is what drives the film.Jackie Susann's fans made this one a winner at the box office, but the reticence of the film probably because certain folks the characters were modeled on were very much alive kind of neutered the content.

eric-1501 Ick. Everyone's rich. Everyone's decayed. Everyone's white. Everyone's horny. Everyone's drunk. The subplot of a young adult with sexual feelings for her dad made me uncomfortable, and not in a "last scene of North by Northwest" way either. Strangely, Kirk Douglas just goes through the motions. Alexis Smith contributes nothing more than if she'd been typing into Stephen Hawking's voice machine. David Janssen is still hoping his looks will divert people from finding out he can't act. Melina's kind of interesting. And George Hamilton is good at putting down the idle rich by just playing one of them. Other than that, a waste of time.

Vince-5 Jacqueline Susann's glamorous, emotional, highly personal novels always lost something in their translation to the screen. Once Is Not Enough is another prime example. But it doesn't have the unintended hilarity of Valley of the Dolls, nor the compelling sleaziness of The Love Machine. The most outrageous and memorable elements of the book are excised completely, and the result is two hours of sudsy romantic nothingness. Without the pills, vitamin shots, wild sex (including an acid-fueled orgy), and disturbing violence that infused the compelling novel, the story is as flat as week-old ginger ale.It's a slick production with an all-star cast, including the engaging Deborah Raffin as January, but the material is awful. The filmmakers' were obviously trying for a "respectable" approach, and the results are just plain boring. Case in point: Jackie provided the book with a surreal, escapist conclusion that's wholly amazing, whereas the movie just...ends. The book was about a naive girl trying to deal with life, and the movie is about--say it with me now!--LOOOOOOOVE! And it's like every other mediocre movie on the subject.However, things are brightened by Brenda Vaccaro in her Golden Globe-winning, Oscar-nominated turn as uninhibited magazine editor Linda Riggs. She's the perfect realization of Susann's character (albeit with toned-down material) and provides a lot more spirit than this tepid production deserves. Her performance alone merits a viewing, but everything else is a daytime-TV-style mess. About as shocking as a trip to the supermarket--perhaps even less so.