The Honey Pot

Rex Harrison and Maggie Smith in The Honey Pot

Joseph L. Mankiewicz's The Honey Pot, from 1967, is an intelligent, but clumsy comic mystery. Mankiewicz reworks Ben Jonson's Volpone and two other sources into what he intended to be a Pirandellian farce. Producer Charles K. Feldman wanted something more along the lines of his hit What's New Pussycat. Add the always volatile Rex Harrison as the Volpone character, Cyril Fox, and The Honey Pot seemed poised to be a troubled shoot.

The troubles went on for five months. Harrison and Mankiewicz feuded constantly. Cinematographers were fired and hired. Harrison's then wife, Rachel Roberts, attempted suicide during the shoot in Rome. For a good insight into the dynamics of the Harrison/Roberts union, I would recommend Richard Burton's diaries. No stranger to strong drink, even Burton was appalled at the sodden antics of the pair.

The Honey Pot is the most ramshackle looking of Feldman's productions. Cyril Fox's Venice palazzo resembles the décor of three different white telephone movies jumbled together. Mankiewicz liked bric a brac, see especially Sleuth, but the interiors here are cheap and ugly. One of the better visual jokes in the movie is, when Mr. Fox has been unmasked as a bankrupt fraud, a reveal that the bottom of a chair reads "Property of Cinecitta".

The exterior shots of Venice are all dim and badly lit. Shots seem rushed. Maybe they never had a sunny day to shoot exteriors in Venice. However, there is little excuse for the quality of the makeup and lighting in the interiors. I don't usually get hissy about visible booms or seeing its shadow, but such shoddy craftmanship is pervasive here and damaging to something that purports to be sophisticated entertainment. Capuchine has dark shadows under her eyes in The Honey Pot which aren't evident in the other productions she appeared in for Feldman. After his death in 1968, her career declined precipitously.

Capuchine, Cliff Robertson, and Edie Adams

The Honey Pot changes the sex of the old friends Fox wishes to bamboozle to female which jibes nicely with Harrison's Lothario image. Fox is assisted in his scam by the improbably named William McFly played by Cliff Robertson. Capuchine is European royalty, Edie Adams is a Hollywood star (so Mankiewicz can take a few jabs at Tinsel Town) and Susan Hayward is reduced to playing a cornpone hypochondriac. Maggie Smith is her nurse. A romance between Ms. Smith and Mr. Robertson seems truncated, probably because the film was trimmed by a half an hour between its UK and US openings. Herschel Bernardi and a number of others are listed in the film's credits, but are nowhere to be found onscreen.

Whatever was cut from the film, enough of Mankiewicz's wit and ease with the cast remain for an amusing viewing. There is certainly plenty of the bitchy hauteur one finds in All About Eve. Not much could be done about Capuchine and I won't sully the legacy of this unfortunate woman by enumerating her onscreen deficiencies. Mankiewicz does draw out the charm and feistiness of both Edie Adams and Susan Hayward. Hayward, who had worked with Mankiewicz on 1949's House of Strangers, overcomes a lousy southern accent with a kittenish performance of gleeful physicality. Despite a bad wig, Maggie Smith is luminous and ideally cast here to verbally fence with Harrison. Too few films used Smith's sexuality and vitality as this one does; maybe just Young Cassidy and Travels with My Aunt. It is a pity she got stuck playing umpteen repressed spinsters on film from Miss Jean Brodie to Professor McGonagall.

A number of critics, particularly Roger Ebert, found Cliff Robertson to be stiff in his role, but I thought Mankiewicz drew out a more playful Robertson than his stolid turns in PT 109 or Battle of the Coral Sea. Robertson was an All-American type who worked best when tweaking that image with rascality or psychosis, as in Underworld USA, The Best Man, The Great Northfield Minnesota Raid, Three Days of the Condor, Obsession, Star 80 and Escape from L.A.. His roles in the David Begelman scandal and Sam Raimi's Spider Man confirmed his good guy image, but where do they finish in Hollywood?

I am not a huge admirer of Rex Harrison. The attempted seduction scenes in The Honey Pot made even this iron stomached libertarian queasy knowing what I do of Harrison's personal life. Still, he gets to do Henry Higgins again and that is his range. Harrison did good work for Mankiewicz in The Ghost and Mrs. Muir and, even, Cleopatra while Burton and Taylor were otherwise engaged. This is one of the better Harrison starring vehicles of the era in comparison to such duds as Cleopatra, The Yellow Rolls Royce, The Agony and the Ecstasy, Staircase and, especially, Doctor Doolittle. Noel Coward said that if Harrison hadn't been the second best British light comic actor, Coward gave himself the top spot, he would have been a good car salesman.