Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Better Than I Remembered, November 14, 2005
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.
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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Good performances, August 10, 2005
Being made in the 70's, I'm sure the film was considered fairly risque. I bought it because I'm a big fan of David Janssen and hadn't seen this particular film. I thought all the performances were good and found it held up surprisingly entertaining over the years. It did not, however, follow the book that closely. The ending was disappointing as you don't really have a clue what is going to happen to the Deborah Raffin's character. David Janssen has some absolutly wonderful moments on screen. If he had taken better care of himself and lived longer, I think he would have become a major film star (as he already was on television). Ladies...the film is worth it just to see DJ in the buff. Hit the rewind button, please...!
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4.0 out of 5 stars
Female DJ fans enjoy !, October 13, 2007
I bought this as David Janssen in it, and for that it was most definitely worth it. Story & some of the lines made me laugh more than a bit. Sure DJ had fun making it. I's very corny but really quite fun.Great for female David Janssen fans :)
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