Product Details

• Actors: Kirk Douglas, Alexis Smith, David Janssen, George Hamilton, Melina Mercouri
• Format: Color, HiFi Sound, NTSC
• Rated: R (Restricted)
• Number of tapes: 1
• Studio: Paramount Home Video
• VHS Release Date: October 19, 1994
• Run Time: 121 minutes
• Average Customer Review: 3.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (17 customer reviews)
• ASIN: 6300216616
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #183,868 in Movies & TV (See Top 100 in Movies & TV)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

18 of 20 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Once Is Probably More Than Enough, September 13, 2010

By 

K. Harris "Film aficionado" (Albuquerque, NM) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Jacqueline Susann's Once Is Not Enough (DVD)

In the lexicon of bad film, there is surely a top spot for the delightfully skewed adaptation of Jacqueline Susann's "Valley of the Dolls." "Valley" is perhaps the most famous side of Susann's literary "trash trilogy" which includes "Love Machine" and "Once Is Not Enough." All the novels were fabulously popular in their day and all have been produced into movies with varying degrees of success. Sublimely ridiculous, "Valley" is beloved as a camp classic for so many terrific reasons. If possible, the film of "Love Machine" was even more preposterous--and much more of a "love it" or hate it" proposition. And then we've got "Once Is Not Enough." Easily the most subdued of the film adaptations, "Once" doesn't actually benefit from this distinction.

The film starts out promisingly enough with Kirk Douglas as a down and out filmmaker willing to do anything for the light and love of his life, his daughter January (Deborah Raffin, alternately charming and annoying). He marries a wealthy acquaintance, the terrific Alexis Smith, in a business arrangement to secure his daughter's future. Disturbingly, Douglas and Raffin are as close and co-dependent as any father-daughter team can be. A smarmy George Hamilton is on hand as a possible suitor for Raffin, and a man hungry Brenda Vaccaro camps it up as Raffin's friend and employer (although for the life of me, I could never figure out why she was getting a paycheck). I genuinely enjoyed the beginning and set-up of "Once Is Not Enough," but when Raffin meets David Janssen--its all over. Raffin romances Janssen (an older man--she does have daddy issues--that despises her father) and the film turns a bit too earnest for its own good.

I didn't hate "Once Is Not Enough." However, when the picture changes its focus to this May-December pairing, it loses much of its vitality. In the end, only Vaccaro maintains a pleasing sense of absurdity and unpredictability. Spouting terrific one-liners and unabashedly over-the-top, Vaccaro was actually nominated for an Oscar! Yes, as hard as it is to believe, "Once Is Not Enough" is an Academy Award nominated film for, of all things, its campiest element. Still, I loved Vaccaro. It's hard to really recommend "Once Is Not Enough." It's not serious enough to be moving but not funny enough to be a guilty pleasure. For me, the nicest Susann adaptation, therefore, is the one I enjoy the least after all these years. KGHarris, 9/10.

11 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Better Than I Remembered, November 14, 2005

By 

Kevin Killian (San Francisco, CA United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Once Is Not Enough [VHS] (VHS Tape)

Deborah Raffin is really worth seeing in ONCE IS NOT ENOUGH. I remember seeing this film when it first came out and thinking it ghastly, but now when I watch it, I'm in awe of Raffin. Okay, she's not much of an actress and will never give Meryl Streep any competition, but, well, I sound like a perve but she just exudes youth and beauty in the part of January Wayne, and her coltish, extremely thin clotheshorseness is so endearing, even when she gives out one of her questionable line readings I just love her.

She's great when she's obviously in love with her own father (but she doesn't realize this until the very last minute of the movie, and instead of a psychic shock, she evinces only a typically cat-like smile, as though a pleasant memory were running somewhere in her mind). I love her playing the newbie to Brenda Vaccaro's Manhattan media slut. She can't believe how vulgar Vaccaro is, and yet she seems to delight in it, Vaccaro's sex talk brings her alive in a way nothing else seems to.

I love her as the stepdaughter of the jealous, Lesbian stepmother "Dee," played by Alexis Smith with a small arsenal of oversized, elegant coups de theatre. Smith is ludicrous as Dee, and even though she not's young like Raffin, you manage to appreciate her performance in just the same way. It's as if both Smith and Raffin believe somehow they're acting in a Eugene O'Neill drama--they're giving it everything they've got, which in Raffin's case is "not much" and in Smith's case it's "everything but the kitchen sink." All Kirk Douglas can do under the circumstances is duck.

It sounds as though I'm ascribing an element of camp to these two performances, but I'm not. No one who has ever seen ONCE IS NOT ENOUGH would think Raffin or Smith capable of the camp gesture, not when you stand them anywhere near Melina Mercouri as "Karla," the Garbo-like actress who is dating Alexis Smith's son, George Hamilton, AND (spoiler) Alexis Smith too! Mercouri has got to be seen to be believed. Next to her, Raffin and Smith are as natural and real as Gena Rowlands and Geraldine Page might have been.

The whole movie is a trip, with one really good scene: Raffin and David Janssen quarrel sulkily, like Bardot in Contempt, in a hotel room in LA, while a silent TV plays a "special report" involving the death of two other major characters in the film. It's a strange scene, almost as if dragged in from some other, more contemporary 70s film, a Hal Ashby touch in a Mitchell Leisen soapfest.

For those hoping to see David Janssen nude, well, he's there, in the flesh, but oh my, the camera should have captured his butt a good fifteen years before this moment of unveiling. That ass is so big it deserves special billing. There's something creepy about Deborah Raffin having to deal with it, still a teenager, in her first major movie.

8 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Brenda Vacarro SHINES, but NOT ENOUGH DRUGS!, February 10, 1999

By 

Christopher Francis (North Hollywood, CA USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Once Is Not Enough [VHS] (VHS Tape)

Although I wasn't as disappointed with this film as the previous reviewer, it was quite a letdown after reading the book. The "vitamin shots" and other assorted goodies (gang rapes, Karla's secret retarded daughter, etc.) that didn't make it on screen severely lower the scandal and glamour level of this film, but the exotic locales and Deborah Raffin's innate charm are undeniably great. It's also fun to see some of the retro kitschy sets (especially George Hamilton's swingin' bachelor pad), and the disco sequence. The film's saving grace is definitely Brenda Vacarro as the unabashed man hungry corporate sleep around Linda Riggs. Her Oscar nomination for the role was well deserved, and I am disappointed she didn't win. The bottom line, however, is this: NOT ENOUGH DRUGS!!!