Father Lusts Best

By JAY COCKS

JACQUELINE SUSANN'S ONCE IS NOT ENOUGH

Directed by GUY GREEN Screenplay by JULIUS J. EPSTEIN

There is something exhilarating about inadvertent comedy. Few things are as bracing as the spectacle of a lot of people spending good money trying to be serious and making fools of them selves. By these standards, Jacqueline Susann 's Once Is Not Enough is an accidentally entertaining piece of work.

No Big Thing. A project like this must be mounted with both reverence for the source material and fearless vulgarity. Such qualities are in evidence here, as Damon Runyon characters used to say, more than somewhat. The movie has to do with a biscuit-eyed lovely named January Wayne (Deborah Raffin) who has a thing about her movie-producer father Mike (Kirk Douglas).

Well, not that much of a thing since the late Jacqueline Susann didn't write that kind of dirty books. It is at least enough of a thing, however, to propel January toward an older man, an adversary of her father's named Tom Colt (David Janssen). Colt's main grudge against Wayne: "He took my Pulitzer Prize novel and messed it up as a movie."

January throws herself onto Colt's impotent lap, precipitating a whole series of romantic climaxes and their dramatic antitheses. There are other funny goings-on: a putative sapphic interlude between Alexis Smith and Melina Mercouri, which sends off as many sparks as a doused campfire; an astronaut's confession that his wife and he "didn't really get along before I flew to the moon"; Brenda Vaccaro's struggle as a magazine editor who cannot write, bragging that "we have a whole staff of underpaid shmucks to take care of that."

As for the actors, they are all worthy of every moment of this film, which is both the most and least that can be said of them.

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