It's a movie as timely as it is provocative and amazingly, for much of its running time, it is weirdly funny.

Great example of an old-fashioned, pure-at-heart escapist event movie that doesn't pretend to be anything that it's not and has boat loads of fun being its own ludicrous self.

All of these films share one commonality, that being a kind of emotional center that humanizes a cast of monsters.

This is one of the best movies I’ve seen in a very long time. You have to go and see this on the big screen.

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.

... Thank goodness legendary Hollywood film composer Henry Mancini wrote the score for this movie, for as usual, it elevates this flick with its interesting cast! - Led by Kirk Douglas, the ensemble is then headed up by Brenda Vacarro, who was nominated for an Oscar and won a Golden Globe award for her tasty role. ... "Once is Not Enough" is "Valley of The Dolls" East, but not as good! Still, is has its moments. And having worked in print-journalism for 35+ yrs. in the mainstream and gay media on both coasts: including 15-yrs. with "Billboard Magazine" in L.A., Vegas-&-the Bflo./Rochester, NY markets - I've met these "types" and lived in their worlds briefly. - Some are shallow for sure, selfish, others caring, kind, talented. Of course rich, often stingy while others very generous. All human. Kudos to Paramount Studios for this semi-gem from 1975!

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.

I saw this because I like Kirk Douglas and have been looking for his most obscure titles to flesh out my catalog of viewing... This qualified as obscure so I rented it at the "we have everything" videostore. YUCH! This movie deserves to be obscure! The production was trite, the story stupid, most of the characters seem to have phoned this one in and Kirk looks silly trying to do his normal workmanlike job against this panoply of mediocrity. This one should have been burned. What can I say? Jaquiline Susan was an aberration of the seventies which we all look back upon with horror just as we look upon bell-bottom jeans and afro wigs as abortions of bad taste blocking up the world. This movie is unintentionally bad.