# The Honey Pot
**The Honey Pot** is a 1967 American comedy-mystery film written, directed, and produced by [Joseph L. Mankiewicz](https://www.edgepedia.org/joseph-l-mankiewicz), starring [Rex Harrison](https://www.edgepedia.org/rex-harrison) as a Venetian millionaire who pretends to be dying to trick three former mistresses into competing for his fortune. It was Mankiewicz's first film after the troubled production of *Cleopatra* (1963) and the last film for which he wrote the screenplay.[1](https://catalog.afi.com/Film/23808-THE-HONEY-POT) • [2](https://mubi.com/en/notebook/posts/the-forgotten-joseph-l-mankiewiczs-the-honey-pot-1967)
| Key fact | Detail |
|---|---|
| Release | London premiere 21 Mar 1967; New York opening 22 May 1967; Los Angeles opening 28 Jun 1967[1](https://catalog.afi.com/Film/23808-THE-HONEY-POT) |
| Director/writer | Joseph L. Mankiewicz (screenplay, direction, and production, with Charles K. Feldman)[1](https://catalog.afi.com/Film/23808-THE-HONEY-POT) |
| Sources | Thomas L. Sterling's novel *The Evil of the Day* (1955), Frederick Knott's play *Mr. Fox of Venice* (London opening 15 Apr 1959), and Ben Jonson's *Volpone* (1605)[1](https://catalog.afi.com/Film/23808-THE-HONEY-POT) |
| Principal cast | Rex Harrison (Cecil Fox), Susan Hayward (Mrs. Lone-Star Crockett Sheridan), Cliff Robertson (William McFly), Capucine (Princess Dominique), Edie Adams (Merle McGill), Maggie Smith (Sarah Watkins), Adolfo Celi (Inspector Rizzi)[1](https://catalog.afi.com/Film/23808-THE-HONEY-POT) |
| Production | Began 20 Sep 1965 at Cinecitta Studios in Rome, with a week of location work in Venice; the shoot ran five months[1](https://catalog.afi.com/Film/23808-THE-HONEY-POT) • [3](https://www.filmcomment.com/cinema-67-revisited-honey-pot/) |
| Running time | 131 minutes in the AFI catalog record; the version reviewed by the trades ran over two and a half hours, and a 150-minute print has circulated[1](https://catalog.afi.com/Film/23808-THE-HONEY-POT) • [3](https://www.filmcomment.com/cinema-67-revisited-honey-pot/) • [4](https://www.filmlinc.org/films/the-honey-pot/) |
| Alternate titles | *Anyone for Venice?*, *Mr. Fox of Venice*, *Tale of the Fox*, *It Comes Up Murder*[1](https://catalog.afi.com/Film/23808-THE-HONEY-POT) |
## Spoilers
### Plot
Cecil Fox, a twentieth-century millionaire living in a seventeenth-century palazzo in Venice, attends a performance of his favorite play, *Volpone*, and devises a Volpone-style scheme: he will pretend to be a dying man and trick three of his former mistresses, each wealthy in her own right and each with reason to covet his fortune, into believing one of them will inherit. To stage the charade he hires William McFly, a gigolo and sometime actor, as his secretary-servant.[1](https://catalog.afi.com/Film/23808-THE-HONEY-POT)
The three women arrive for the deathbed vigil and the reading of the will: Merle McGill, a fading Hollywood sex symbol whose career Fox launched; Princess [Dominique](https://www.edgepedia.org/dominique), who once cruised on Fox's yacht; and Lone-Star Crockett Sheridan, a Texas hypochondriac traveling with her enigmatic nurse, Sarah Watkins. Lone-Star declares herself the rightful heir as Fox's common-law wife, and that night she is found dead of an overdose of sleeping pills. Sarah suspects McFly of murder; after escaping through a dumb-waiter into Fox's chambers, she discovers the "dying man" pirouetting about the room, ballet dancing being his one unfulfilled ambition. It becomes apparent that Fox, flat broke, had hoped to inherit Lone-Star's vast fortune himself. Realizing his scheme has failed, he dances into one of the Venice canals, and Sarah inherits both Lone-Star's wealth and McFly.[1](https://catalog.afi.com/Film/23808-THE-HONEY-POT)
## Literary sources
The film is a triple adaptation. Mankiewicz based his screenplay on *The Evil of the Day*, a 1955 novel by Thomas L. Sterling, and on its 1959 stage adaptation by playwright Frederick Knott, which debuted in London as *Mr. Fox of Venice*; both works were themselves modern variations on [Ben Jonson](https://www.edgepedia.org/ben-jonson)'s Elizabethan satire *Volpone*.[1](https://catalog.afi.com/Film/23808-THE-HONEY-POT) • [4](https://www.filmlinc.org/films/the-honey-pot/) The AFI catalog dates Jonson's play to 1605, while [Turner Classic Movies](https://www.edgepedia.org/turner-classic-movies) places it in 1606.[1](https://catalog.afi.com/Film/23808-THE-HONEY-POT) • [5](https://www.tcm.com/articles/637748/the-honey-pot) In Jonson's original, a wealthy miser deceives three old friends into giving him expensive gifts by pretending he is about to die and name one of them in his will; the film's hero, Cecil Fox, takes his surname from the English meaning of "Volpone," fox.[5](https://www.tcm.com/articles/637748/the-honey-pot)
Mankiewicz's first draft was far more daring than the finished film. As Mankiewicz first envisioned it, the story would be punctuated every so often by memos from a censor of the Hays Office kind, and his script featured a device blending Brecht with Pirandello: at moments the performers would withdraw from the drama to hear how their lines sounded, dispute whether those lines rang true, and answer requests for changes coming from the studio or the Production Code. [United Artists](https://www.edgepedia.org/united-artists) chairman Arthur Krim forced Mankiewicz to excise the censor element, and the studio is said to have vetoed the framing device altogether.[4](https://www.filmlinc.org/films/the-honey-pot/) • [3](https://www.filmcomment.com/cinema-67-revisited-honey-pot/)
## Production
Mankiewicz began work on the project in 1964, his first film since *Cleopatra*, which he later called "humiliating and not gratifying." He recruited Rex Harrison for their fourth screen collaboration; Harrison had just won the Best Actor Academy Award for *[My Fair Lady](https://www.edgepedia.org/my-fair-lady-film)* (1964). [Principal photography](https://www.edgepedia.org/principal-photography) began on 20 September 1965 under the working title *Anyone for Venice?*, at Cinecitta Studios in Rome, where *Cleopatra* had been shot. After three weeks on the lot, the unit moved to Venice for a week of location filming before returning to Cinecitta.[1](https://catalog.afi.com/Film/23808-THE-HONEY-POT) • [3](https://www.filmcomment.com/cinema-67-revisited-honey-pot/)
**A troubled shoot.** Around the Venice relocation, Mankiewicz fired the original director of photography, Piero Portalupi, and replaced him with Gianni Di Venanzo, who had just shot Fellini's *Juliet of the Spirits* and who used diffused lighting that broke from the bright look traditional in comedies. Because of the lighting change, Harrison and [Cliff Robertson](https://www.edgepedia.org/cliff-robertson) were forced to reshoot the first two weeks of footage. The shoot dragged on for five months, and the director and star reached what Film Comment's Mark Harris, author of *Pictures at a Revolution* (2008), calls an unhappy truce; Harrison later described the production as "not a happy experience." Mankiewicz refused to dub actors' flubbed lines, requiring some scenes to be repeated dozens of times, and spent $20,000 on last-minute additions to the furnishings of Fox's bedroom set. Harrison studied card games with a professional magician and took ballet lessons for the role, though much of the dance scene was shot with a double.[1](https://catalog.afi.com/Film/23808-THE-HONEY-POT) • [3](https://www.filmcomment.com/cinema-67-revisited-honey-pot/)
Post-production was completed in London. [André Previn](https://www.edgepedia.org/andre-previn) was hired to score the film in March 1966 but was replaced that summer by John Addison, whose music [The New Yorker](https://www.edgepedia.org/the-new-yorker)'s critic noted for its "frequent witty echoes of Puccini." The title changed several times during development, from *Mr. Fox of Venice* to *Anyone for Venice?* to *The Honey Pot*, a name the Los Angeles Times review criticized as "unattractive" and unconnected to the plot or sources.[1](https://catalog.afi.com/Film/23808-THE-HONEY-POT) • [6](https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1967/06/03/death-in-venice)
## Release and reception
Mankiewicz hosted a midnight preview screening at the Prince Charles Theatre in London on 20 March 1967, and the film opened in New York on 22 May 1967 as the first feature screening at the newly renovated Trans-Lux West Theatre, previously a newsreel house. The West Coast engagement followed at the Fine Arts Theatre in Beverly Hills on 28 June 1967.[1](https://catalog.afi.com/Film/23808-THE-HONEY-POT)
**Box office and cuts.** The film was both a critical and commercial failure. Dismal returns prompted United Artists to demand twenty minutes of cuts, including the loss of the character played by Herschel Bernardi, and in October 1967 the distributor rebranded the picture as *It Comes Up Murder*, with print advertisements calling it "The Year's Top Suspense-Murder Thriller." Even at the shorter length it found little favor with critics and went largely unnoticed by moviegoers.[5](https://www.tcm.com/articles/637748/the-honey-pot) • [1](https://catalog.afi.com/Film/23808-THE-HONEY-POT)
Contemporary reviews divided along the film's two registers. Roger Ebert, film critic of the *Chicago Sun-Times*, compared it to a leisurely John Dickson Carr thriller, praised Harrison as "splendid as a 17th Century nobleman trapped in the 20th Century," and judged the 155-minute cut's ending "complex, logical, unexpected and gloriously satisfying," while finding Cliff Robertson wooden. Brendan Gill in *The New Yorker* conceded that the movie "begins charmingly" but wrote that it plunges from Jonson's parable on avarice into a conventional mystery with too many implausible reversals. The Cleveland Press found the dialogue "bright and brittle" and called it one of the most sophisticated comedies to reach the screen, while Mark Harris's 2017 retrospective judged it "sour and misanthropic" rather than wickedly funny.[7](https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/the-honey-pot-1967) • [6](https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1967/06/03/death-in-venice) • [8](https://clevelandmemory.com/mastroianni/tm276.html) • [3](https://www.filmcomment.com/cinema-67-revisited-honey-pot/) On the Rotten Tomatoes Tomatometer the film stands at 57 percent, based on 7 reviews.[9](https://tv.apple.com/us/movie/the-honey-pot/umc.cmc.5rx3fvduzm7eo97f702t6mtun)
## Place in Mankiewicz's career
The Honey Pot was the last film for which Mankiewicz wrote the screenplay, and the script's preoccupation with theatricality, multiple identities, and strategic artifice links it to *All About Eve* (1950) and the later *[Sleuth](https://www.edgepedia.org/sleuth-1972-film)* (1972). He directed only one more film, *Sleuth*, which earned him his final Oscar nomination.[2](https://mubi.com/en/notebook/posts/the-forgotten-joseph-l-mankiewiczs-the-honey-pot-1967) • [3](https://www.filmcomment.com/cinema-67-revisited-honey-pot/) • [10](https://researchspace.bathspa.ac.uk/15901/1/15901.pdf) Later assessments have been kinder than the 1967 reception: Film at [Lincoln Center](https://www.edgepedia.org/lincoln-center)'s 2014 notes called it "an elaborate black comedy that has aged beautifully over the years," and singled out a young [Maggie Smith](https://www.edgepedia.org/maggie-smith), as Hayward's nurse Sarah Watkins, for stealing the show, particularly in her scenes with Harrison.[4](https://www.filmlinc.org/films/the-honey-pot/)
## References
1. [The Honey Pot (1967), AFI Catalog of Feature Films](https://catalog.afi.com/Film/23808-THE-HONEY-POT)
2. [The Forgotten: Joseph L. Mankiewicz's "The Honey Pot" (1967), David Cairns, MUBI Notebook](https://mubi.com/en/notebook/posts/the-forgotten-joseph-l-mankiewiczs-the-honey-pot-1967)
3. [Cinema '67 Revisited: The Honey Pot, Mark Harris, Film Comment (May-June 2017)](https://www.filmcomment.com/cinema-67-revisited-honey-pot/)
4. [The Honey Pot, Film at Lincoln Center](https://www.filmlinc.org/films/the-honey-pot/)
5. [The Honey Pot, Richard Harland Smith, Turner Classic Movies](https://www.tcm.com/articles/637748/the-honey-pot)
6. [Death in Venice, Brendan Gill, The New Yorker (June 3, 1967)](https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1967/06/03/death-in-venice)
7. [The Honey Pot movie review, Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times (May 25, 1967)](https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/the-honey-pot-1967)
8. ["Honey Pot" Boils Over With Wit and Violence, Tony Mastroianni, Cleveland Press (July 1, 1967)](https://clevelandmemory.com/mastroianni/tm276.html)
9. [The Honey Pot, Apple TV (Tomatometer data)](https://tv.apple.com/us/movie/the-honey-pot/umc.cmc.5rx3fvduzm7eo97f702t6mtun)
10. [RELEASE/IMPACT – June 1963-October 1966, Bath Spa University research repository](https://researchspace.bathspa.ac.uk/15901/1/15901.pdf)
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*Topic: Encyclopedia › Arts and culture › Screen and stage › Film and television › Films and standalone screen works › Individual films by title and year › Comedy and romantic films (individual works) › Comedies of the 1960s*
*Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026 · Last review: Oct 25, 2026*
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License: Edgepedia Community License 1.0, https://www.edgepedia.org/edgepedia/license