Jeanskynebu the audience applauded

SpuffyWeb Sadly Over-hyped

Nayan Gough A great movie, one of the best of this year. There was a bit of confusion at one point in the plot, but nothing serious.

Billy Ollie Through painfully honest and emotional moments, the movie becomes irresistibly relatable

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.

Aussie Stud If you happen to catch this movie, it could easily be mistaken for the pilot episode of an 80's prime-time soap. How the producers thought that anyone would seriously pay good money to watch this midday made-for-TV movie at the theater is incredibly hilarious.Kirk Douglas surprisingly headlines this incestuous melodrama where his daughter January (Deborah Raffin) harbors some sort of daddy-complex since the day she was born. I would have loved to have sat through a theater screening of this and observed the faces of the audience around me. I don't know if I would have seen smirks or looks of discomfort, like someone shouldn't have eaten those bad tacos for lunch.The movie is very outdated. It's lifted right from a Jacqueline Susann novel (or basically take your pick from any Harlequin read) and plays out just like it on the small screen. Most of the close-ups are shot through a filter, the soundtrack is hijacked by Henry Mancini's orchestrated strings, and all the actresses parade themselves with such high camp you'll find it hard not to fall in love with this atrocity.Most hilarious is January's attraction to David Janssen's character. Talk about taking the daddy-complex to the next level! Brenda Vaccaro who received an Oscar nomination(!!!) for her portrayal of a man-hungry sex-starved magazine editor is absolutely stunning. She delivered plain awful dialog with perfect snap, "He laid me, and then he fired me!" and also managing to keep a straight face at the same time, she definitely deserved the nomination.The best line comes out of the mouth of Douglas' long-suffering housekeeper, Mabel (Lillian Randolph), "For twelve years, it's just been a parade of poon-tang!", as she boards the bus to Santa Monica.Throw in a closeted lesbian millionaire engaging in a secret relationship with a reclusive Hispanic actress (where else could you view an interracial middle-aged lesbian sex scene!!), gratuitous shots of Gary Conway (portraying an astronaut LOL!) running in short shorts on a beach and Deborah Raffin staring blankly into the camera as if she were doped on percosets, and you have the ultimate camp classic of 1975.There was a scene with Raffin's character walking blankly across the road (nearly getting run over by a taxi) after she is devastated by Janssen's character, and yet I still could not determine any difference in her acting from that scene to the entire film.Vaccaro is definitely the one thing that holds this movie together, although her character isn't necessary to the story. She seemed to express more personality than all of the other characters combined that it was a joy to watch her self-diagnosing, "Sleeping with men makes me feel better!" It made me feel better too.

nunculus Wackadoo slice of late Susann--the most swanky I-love-daddy fantasy ever committed to celluloid. Little princess Deborah Raffin can't get over those warm, tingly feelings she has for Daddy (Kirk Douglas), a worn-out Hollywood producer reduced to marrying a lesbian billionaire (Alexis Smith) to keep Princess in cashmere. When she feels her special place has been taken by the sapphic capitalist, she shifts to a handy incest-surrogate--a soused genius novelist (David Janssen) who seems to be modeled after Norman Mailer. In a stroke of sublime Susann fantasy, Mailer-Janssen is impotent--cured by the nubile caresses of Princess. Throw in Brenda Vaccaro as a man-eating fashion editor and you have a mound of trash with as much fragrance as a New York sanitation strike.The saddest credits on this number: "Producer--Howard Koch. Assistant Director--Howard Koch, Jr." Imagine the agony of poor Guy Green, an aging British yeoman who had just finished work on a biography of Martin Luther, as he struggled with the correct way to shoot a sex scene between Alexis Smith and Melina Mercouri. It's all not quite as peacocklike as it sounds, but Susann certainly had a pop style--the raspy voice of an old Broadway bawd telling an ingenue (i.e., her hausfrau-ly reader), how it really is in the big, ugly, grown-up world. The freaky, non-contradictory mix of camp, obsession and melodrama a la fromage has a sweetness a half century later: the biggest-selling woman author of all time really did just want to be a pampered shiksa teenager stroking some graying temples.