Bad Movies We Love on DVD: Once is Not Enough

The cotton-white shag carpets, the eight-inch-wide dinner jacket lapels, the nightclub bongo jazz, whiskey decanters in every room, sideburns on every over-tanned skull, Vaseline on every camera lens -- the 1975 of Jacqueline Susann's Once Is Not Enough is where old Burbank movie agents go when they die. Finally out on DVD from Olive Films, this smelly Persian cat of a movie was a middle-aged sensation in its day, which may help us understand a few things, like why Richard Nixon was elected President. Twice.

If it's remembered now at all -- I'm sure most viewers have locked any trace of it out of their consciousness, like the experience of a bad car wreck -- it's for Brenda Vaccaro's Supporting Actress Oscar nomination, which she got for tossing her hair and saying "screw!" in every line. At least I think that's why.

But there's so much here to wallow in: The flouncy Henry Mancini score alone could be and may well have been used an enhanced interrogation technique at Gitmo; the story is a romance-pulp excuse for Hollywood wealth porn, rolling out in hotel rooms the size of soccer fields. Aging producer Kirk Douglas, in order to support the life of luxury he and his beautiful 20-year-old daughter Deborah Raffin are used to, marries billionaire megabitch Alexis Smith, at which point Raffin's love life veers far away from George Hamilton's tanned-leathered slickster and toward David Janssen's growling, hulking alchie of a novelist. Incestuous impulses loom. And so on. Susann constructed her stories like toddlers construct towers out of blocks; if you pay attention, you can see them fall down in every other scene.

But that's the thing: No one pays attention, which is as it should be, because here comes Kirk Douglas, dressed in white slacks and white shoes and walking a giant white poodle down the Lake Geneva dockside. My God, Kirk, what are you doing? But that's nothing once you get a load of a braless, dragon-esque 55-year-old Melina Mercouri as Smith's lesbian lover (in a lovepad scene complete with grapes, wine, and a fat hunk of uncut bologna), or Raffin, who resembles a Susan Dey mannequin just come, barely, to life. By the time Vaccaro shows up, as a cheery slut-cum-mag editor, you're happy for her trampy zest. Or at least somebody was. 1975 must not have been a sterling year for supporting actresses.

When David Janssen, doing a boozy, self-conscious Norman Mailer schtick, is the most convincing actor in your fat Hollywood melodrama, you know you've already scuttled the ship. But Once Is Not Enough is a ruin that's practically a mourn-the-bad-taste-of-the-'70s party all by itself. Drinking like everybody in the film is essential.