January (Deborah Raffin) is coming home. Having spent many agonizing months rehabilitating at a plush, no-dollar-spared facility in the mountains of Switzerland, she is ready to return stateside into the loving arms of her father, Mike (Kirk Douglas). The very loving arms of her father. You see, January has a father complex. Only that’s understating matters by a factor of several thousand. This is more akin to father desire. Father lust. A fetish for daddy so severe and deep, there wasn’t a Freudian alive who felt prepared to handle it. She was discharged from the institute with what amounted to a medical shrug. Hands in the air because no one had seen anything like it in a century of analysis. Craving your papa is one thing, but this chick wanted to bed down at the earliest opportunity. One of those “get her the hell out of here before we find them copulating in the x-ray lab” kind of things. Maybe it was the motorcycle accident that set her off. Perhaps. Only she was telling everyone within earshot how gorgeously sexy her dad was well before her noggin cracked open on the pavement. When the famously kind-hearted Swiss are fed the fuck up, you know you’re in trouble.
Back home, January is feeling herself. Bones healed, mind sharp, she can return at last to the only thing a rich, pampered member of the creative class has going for her: sexual intercourse with older men. It’s Hollywood, baby, and daddy’s contacts, top to bottom, are exactly what she needs: gray hair, sagging balls, and perversions so twisted, the term “thirty years my junior” doesn’t even register on the Creep-o-Meter. It’s all but an industry mandate. Thing is, January is still a virgin. She knows she must fuck daddy in spirit (if not the actual man), but her passions have yet to meet with real world application. After all, she had just spent months recovering from a mindless affair with a youngster that was designed only to piss of the parental unit, so she needs a bit more practice. Everyone is always telling her how beautiful she is, so surely this won’t be difficult.
Before she gets down to business, however, January must meet with a friend. Daddy is loaded, sure, but she could use a job. Who better to consult than the editor of one of those kooky, drivel-driven magazines that proliferated in the 1970’s as commonly as butterfly collars and cocaine habits? The editor in question, the delightful Linda (Oscar-nominated Brenda Vacarro), is the polar opposite of January. They share a pathological need to fuck, sure, but only Linda has actually gone to bat a few times. Okay, a few hundred times. If it breathes, she fucks it, and her logbook long ago surrendered to weather-beaten and dog-eared. She’s just as fond of aging father figures, but she’s also just as likely to fuck the young. And the sick. The jury is still out on the dying. Linda is everything we want movie characters to be, then and now, and given the acting chops of Ms. Raffin (hint: she has none), she’s a breath of fresh air indeed, with fast lips, faster hips, and an unapologetic drive to be herself. I fell in love myself almost instantly.
While the film unquestionably sags a bit when Linda takes leave, there’s still plenty to enjoy with January and her sexual adventures. Thankfully, she first takes up with The Fugitive himself, Mr. David Janssen, playing a guy named Tom Colt as if he’d been held at gunpoint to mimic Norman Mailer. Sporting the era’s most voluminous chest hair, he’s all unbuttoned machismo at its unholy best. He smokes, he bellows, and he uses every waking opportunity to belittle. Naturally, he’s working on yet another masterpiece, even if Hollywood fucked up his last effort. He’s also impotent, with all the accompanying rage that affliction engenders. I do believe he says it had been almost two years since he got it up, though it stands to reason January becomes the Viagra of the piece, given the half-century difference in age. It also helps that he gets to fuck the daughter of a man he can’t stand, who he also may want to fuck himself. As we know, belligerent masculinity is but a whisper away from full homosexuality, so maybe the dingus is limp because it’s not inside the man with the best dimple in the business.
Tom, like Linda, brings much-needed life to the proceedings, and his “angry writer” schtick, while cliched, is so true to life that we can’t help but see any number of figures in the character, from Hemingway to Philip Roth. But we’ll stick with Mailer, because the hair looks about the same, and both are closely aligned in their staggering self-importance. And Mailer was still the man at this time, so you know damn well the film’s intent was to provoke a libel suit, which could only be good for the box office. Naturally, given Tom’s burly façade, January falls head over heels in love, and at last she has her chance to work out the demons related to her father. It spoils nothing to reveal that daddy finds them in bed together at some point, and, like most fathers, his first inclination is to start a fistfight with a naked man while his naked daughter screams nearby. It’s as American as apple pie. But it doesn’t break them up. January will see this through, even if it costs Tom his life. Especially if it does.
Naturally, because this glorious mess is based on a Jacqueline Susann novel, you know damn well the tragedy doesn’t end with Tom’s malfunctioning cock. January’s father must also be sweating out a financial tornado, which means he’ll marry an old flame who stopped counting ex-husbands once she ran out of fingers. It’s a marriage of convenience, not love, for it’s cash he needs, and companionship for her, since she just happens to be the fourth richest woman on the planet. And yes, she’s also a closet lesbian, which gives us a great scene where she gets to make out with that crazy whore from Never on Sunday. There are pre-nups, arrangements, and fights galore, but nothing could ever hope to top the movie’s way of sending them both to the graveyard.
While January is having yet another pointless discussion with Tom, a nearby television flickers away. The sound is off, so the “Special Report” image is all we see. The images are hard to decipher, but they appear to be airplane wreckage. Oh shit, then a shot of Mike’s wife. Then more plane pieces. It’s a masterstroke of suggestion: January’s father is dead (as is his lesbian wife), victims of a plane crash, and it’s entered into the conversation almost as an afterthought. The destination was New York, where the old bat was just about to sign divorce papers, thereby nullifying January’s $3 million trust. Only now that Mrs. Mike is in ten thousand pieces, the trust remains intact. January is the luckiest woman in the world. She can now scale the heights of high society, even if she never scaled her own father.
She walks the streets unfulfilled in the most basic sense, and the movie – not just January – wallows in regret. Based on the coda alone, it’s quite apparent January will never get over her unfulfilled desires, and if another man enters the room (Tom has decided to leave, given that his penis is now fully functional), her first thought will be of daddy dear. Thank God someone saw the genius in sending Ms. Raffin the Death Wish 3 script a decade hence, lending her the rare opportunity to achieve true cinematic immortality. Though Once is Not Enough would, in fact, have been enough. It’s the sort of trash they don’t make anymore, except on purpose, which is always worse than thinking you’re making the next Citizen Kane. This shit had a big budget, exotic locales, stars to burn, and it damn near landed Lana Turner, who bowed out because she couldn’t bear to kiss a woman. Shooting a man in the heart, yes, but same-sex lip-lock was a bridge too far. The dialogue bristles with bad taste, Kirk Douglas wears one sweater too many, and Henry Mancini scores it all with bombast and bullshit. Thankfully. It’s everything wonderful we left behind and are far too unlikely to recapture. Kitsch at high volume, melodrama without a wink. And the unquenchable need to fuck your own father.
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