Une fois ne suffit pas

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.

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The movie is very outdated.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.

I haven't seen this in a while, and miss this rarely seen pic, which deserves a cult following. Deborah Raffin is outstanding as a gorgeous young girl with strange feelings for her Dad. She gets involved with an unhappy alcoholic writer, played by David Janssen. Brenda Vaccaro is outstanding as her beautiful but embittered friend who is desperate for a man. And Melinda Mercouri is memorable as a lovely lesbian. They knew they were making a piece of trash here, and it is well worth your time. Good job. I esp. like those corny singers at the end of the film which seem to have stepped out of a 1960s movie!Deborah is good and she is fortunate to have such a great ensemble cast to support her. Enjoy!

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.

The big-screen "Valley of the Dolls" and under-appreciated "Love Machine" are both camp film classics in their different ways. But this adaptation of Susann's last novel has a reputation as an embarrassment without being quite bad or enjoyable enough to reward that historical semi-misjudgment. English-born director director Guy Green (perhaps best known for 1965 Sidney Poitier vehicle "A Patch of Blue" and the disastrous 1968 adaptation of John Fowles' "The Magus") does a thoroughly respectable job with his very trashy source material--which is to say he mostly sucks the life out of it via soft-focus and an over-delicate approach to performers who might easily have gone into ham overdrive. They include Kirk Douglas as a Hollywood mogul, Alexis Smith as his ex-wife and Melina Mercouri as her lover; plus Gary Conway, George Hamilton and David Janssen as suitors to our heroine, Douglas' daughter Deborah Raffin.

The latter was a classic 70s shampoo commercial (Clairol!) blonde beauty a la Cybill Shepherd almost boosted to stardom in films that fell short. She's more emotionally naturalistic than this movie's often ludicrous soap-opera situations deserve. But at the same time, a more histrionic lead performance and more shamelessly melodramatic directorial hand might have made "Once Is Not Enough" an enduring guilty pleasure rather than just a dated bad movie. Watching it again just now did make me wonder about Raffin, however, who's apparently remained active as a TV/film actress with a modest profile (according to IMDb). She was only 21 when she made this movie, but she holds her own alongside some historied stars.

The best thing about "Once Is Not Enough," however, is Brenda Vaccaro. Following a long line of wisecracking second leads from Pert Kelton to Eve Arden to Dyan Cannon and beyond, she gets an unexpectedly ideal showcase in a seriocomic support role in a disposable movie. She's terrific. Her enjoyment in the role does a lot to dignify a stupid film--one otherwise marked mostly by the efforts of talented people to ignore how trashy their source material is.