The Honey Pot (1967)

Rex Harrison: Cecil Fox

Photos 

Quotes 

• Cecil Fox : Nothing like gold to pass the time. It is even the color of time... Gold. How little most people value time, little people. Like everything else, they will choose what's more, not what's better. Even time, they will pray to live 100, long, miserable years and feel cheated if they had say 50 of the best. Quantity yes, quality no. Venice is tiny and precious. Los Angeles is gigantic and terrifying. Who wants it? Most people, that's who. There's good time and bad time, you know, the clocks don't give a damn what time they measure. We do. We special ones. We slow down for the good. We sip it second by second like great wine. We speed up the bad. The little people, chumps, swallow time like hamburger. One hundred years of well done hamburger, they will all settle for that. If I were to tell you that for me, the next 10 minutes of my life will be fuller and richer than the next 10 years for any chump in London, Paris, Rome, New York, or Bangkok, would you know what the hell I was talking about?

• Cecil Fox : [after Nurse Watkins pulls her legs up into the dumbwaiter]  Legs like those on a voice of morality. As unrewarding as the lower half of a mermaid.

• William McFly : What are you trying to prove with all of this?

  Cecil Fox : Why must everything prove something?

  William McFly : Well, there must be something more to it than just fun and games.

  Cecil Fox : Well, you must admit its quite a game - and I promise you the fun's only just starting.

  William McFly : Strange, almost displaced kind of fun. Out of another time, another world.

  Cecil Fox : There's been no other time, really, no other world. We've simply forgotten the pleasure of living in them.

  William McFly : In the 17th Century, for instance, let's say Elizabethan London, when torturing lunatics and animals, bear-baiting was great fun.

  Cecil Fox : Well, for the witless and undemanding, not unlike today's television. The Elizabethan elite, however, for their more exclusive entertainment, baited each other: people-baiting.

• Cecil Fox : I'm not surprised you failed as an actor, your timing has all the sensitivity of a stampeding buffalo.

• Merle McGill : Another thing, Dominque the Queen.

  Cecil Fox : Royalty. Not like us. Not like you and me. Proud of our basic animal emotions. Where we feel, they pretend.

  [embraces Merle] 

  Cecil Fox : God, you're basic. You even smell basic. What's that perfume?

  Merle McGill : It comes from the jungle. The natives dip their arrows in it.

• Sarah Watkins : I don't want to sound like a voice for morality, it makes him angry and you angry. But there are some things...

  Cecil Fox : What things?

  Sarah Watkins : Not gold, perhaps, but still precious. Not negotiable, not even legal tender. Just tender.

  Cecil Fox : Love, for example?

  Sarah Watkins : You can't even say it, you poor man, you make it sound like hate.

• Cecil Fox : Who am I to complain? Others have dead without knowing true gratitude. Others like me: Genghis Khan, Attila the Hun, Hitler.

  Merle McGill : [seductively]  Silly boy! I wouldn't look twice at Hitler.

• Cecil Fox : Do sit down. I don't enjoy looking up at people.

• Cecil Fox : As a huckster, you are touched with genius.

• Merle McGill : [seeing the elaborate Renaissance clock on Fox's mantelpiece]  That one looks like the old days, when they used to wind the clocks by hand.

  Cecil Fox : At one time it belonged to Lucrezia Borgia.

  Merle McGill : Oh? She give it to ya?

• Cecil Fox : Still suffering from stage fright, McBarrymore?

• Cecil Fox : Lone Star was insatiable. A beautiful bottomless pit. There was never enough of anything: money, possessions, food, sex. I thought I had an exorbitant appetite for that particular pastime, but, Lone Star... Imagine if you can, a 17 year old combined Venus and giant squid.

  Merle McGill : I'm trying very hard.

  Cecil Fox : Four fantastic years it lasted. It wore me ought.

• William McFly : Granted three greedy women believe you're dying. Granted they've swallowed your bait. At what point do you yell April fools?

  Cecil Fox : At the moment I have no particular finish in mind. Do you?

  William McFly : It's your script, Mr. Fox.

• Cecil Fox : It isn't easy for a man - when a woman needs him more than he needs her.

• William McFly : For some strange coincidence, both ladies seem to have time on their minds.

  Cecil Fox : So have you and I. So has everyone. It's the one obsession common to all mankind. In the beginning, there was time. Now, after mankind is over or we blow ourselves up or just end, there'll still be time. Have respect for it, McFly.

• Merle McGill : Mr. Fox, both of those broads are basically after your dough.

  Cecil Fox : And you, Bunny?

  Merle McGill : You know money never meant anything to me.

• Cecil Fox : You can't be comfortable, Bunny, all bent over like this with all these clothes on.

• Cecil Fox : Do we underestimate the bouncy little Sarah?

• Cecil Fox : Your profession suits you well, nurse Watkins. You have a bed pan's eye view of life and nature.

• Cecil Fox : Come walk with me in my Elizabethan garden. Take off your low heeled prejudices. Let it grow around you.

• Cecil Fox : I know money, McFly. There's never enough.

• Sarah Watkins : I would very much like to sit down. Will you promise not to molest me?

  Cecil Fox : Molest? Makes me sound like something in a public park.

• Cecil Fox : The sweetest, they say, hang beyond ordinary reach.

• Cecil Fox : My wealth, as an object of contemplation, is now no more pleasurable than my navel.

• William McFly : What's she doing in Baden-Baden?

  Cecil Fox : Taking the baths, I presume. Or, giving them. One never can tell.

• Cecil Fox : I will not have time lying about empty.

• Cecil Fox : In his fantasies, that oaf must imagine himself to be the illegitimate son of Charlie Chan and Jerry Mason.

  William McFly : Perry Mason.

  Cecil Fox : Really? Are you sure?

• Sarah Watkins : Mr. Fox?

  Cecil Fox : Whom did you expect? The Fairy Queen?

• Sarah Watkins : You goaded me into it.

  Cecil Fox : Of course I did - and you bounced right back. You are a bouncy little thing. I sensed it the moment I spotted you. How would you like to be my nurse?

  Sarah Watkins : Not very much, thank you.

• Cecil Fox : What if there was one remaining sapphire surrounded by those pear-shaped diamonds and I wanted you to have it. Would you accept it?

  Sarah Watkins : Certainly not.

  Cecil Fox : Do you know how much of what you call 'living' it would pay for? That bed sitting room would be your's in perpetuity. Hundreds of burglar-proof girdles, thousands of watercress sandwiches.

  Sarah Watkins : I loath watercress and I don't wear a girdle.

• Cecil Fox : Have you your notebook ready, student? Are topic is larceny.

  Sarah Watkins : I seem to have accidentally blundered into the wrong classroom.

• Sarah Watkins : You're being very persuasive, but I know damn well what you're really after.

  Cecil Fox : You have the advantage of me there. I don't know *just* what you're after, but, I'm quite sure you are - or will be - after something.

• Cecil Fox : Any questions? Any answers?

• Cecil Fox : What a speedy little thing. Wouldn't you like to tell me lying down?

• Cecil Fox : [to Sarah]  You haven't the brains of a moth. Like all your sex, incapable of minding your own business. Unfit even to save your own neck!

• Cecil Fox : Chocolate cover marzipan with gold centers - instant relief for the over-sexed, such as you.