ONCE IS NOT ENOUGH (1975)

Mike Wayne (Kirk Douglas) is a one-time big-shot Hollywood producer who can no longer get hired, but he desperately needs money, partly due to paying medical bills for his young (in her late teens) daughter January who has been in a Swiss medical clinic for months, recovering from a serious motorcycle crash (which I assume killed the handsome man who was driving). She returns home happy to be with her dad, but not happy that he has married heiress Deidre Granger. Deidre is very pleasant and very rich, but January intuits that this is a marriage of convenience and does not approve. (In fact, despite having been married four times, the love of Deidre's life is a reclusive retired actress named Karla.) January gets a job as an assistant to Linda, editor of a popular women’s magazine and a promiscuous man-lover. One night, Linda puts the moves (a little desperately) on beefy, hypermasculine author Tom Colt, but he is more interested in January. January is quite interested in him, in part because, as becomes crystal clear, she has major daddy issues. When Linda confronts her by saying, "It would be a lot healthier if you just got it over with and went to bed with your father," January doesn't seem all that shocked. Tom's little secret is his impotence, which of course January manages to cure. Mike discovers January in bed with Tom and beats him up, and soon January has to make a choice between Tom and Dad, just as Mike has to decide if his pride is too great to keep him with Deidre. There are not happy endings in store for anyone.

When I started this blog twenty years ago, I considered any movie before 1960 to be appropriate for review. At some point, I began allowing myself to include movies through the 60s, figuring that most of them feel like period pieces to a 21st century audience in the same way that movies of the 30s and 40s felt to me in the 1970s. As time moved on, I loosened my self-imposed strictures, delving into some early 1970s movies now and again. I guess the time has come to open up my blog to the entire decade. One advantage to this is that I now have an excuse to revisit movies like this that I haven't seen since their initial release. This soap opera melodrama is based on a novel by Jacqueline Susann about the sexual trials and tribulations of the rich and unhappy, and like its predecessor VALLEY OF THE DOLLS, it hasn't aged terribly well, but if you're in the right mood, it's still watchable. With a star like Kirk Douglas (so-so in the role), I expected this to be the story of Mike Wayne, but really it's the story of his daughter, played by Deborah Raffin. In the beginning, it feels like Raffin is trying too hard, but by the middle, I realized that she was going all in for the melodrama; she's more believable than Barbara Parkins was in DOLLS. Alexis Smith is perfect as Deidre (supposedly based on Barbara Hutton), David Janssen is not quite as bombastic as he should have been playing a stand-in for Norman Mailer though he's got the hairy chest for the role (pictured with Raffin above), and Brenda Vaccaro got an Oscar nomination as Linda—she's fun, largely because of her dialogue ("I happen to like screwing," she says matter of factly), but the performance feels a little lightweight. George Hamilton is a playboy who briefly woos Raffin, and poor Gary Conway is given a throwaway role as an astronaut who now lives the simple life of a beachcomber on David Janssen's beach. I thought he was being presented as a healthy alternative for Raffin, somewhere between Janssen and Hamilton, but the filmmakers weren't thinking that hard. Too bad, because Conway is very good in his few scenes. Melina Mercouri is underwhelming in her one scene as Karla (a stand-in for Greta Garbo). Fun for an evening of indulging in nostalgia for forgotten movies of the 1970s. [Criterion Channel]