Outfoxed

The Honey Pot is yet another modern-day version of Ben Jonson's classic, Volpone. Written in 1606, the Elizabethan comedy chronicles the rise and fall of a wily miser who pretends to be dying in order to trick his equally greedy friends into bringing him costly deathbed gifts. Each donor believes that he will be Volpone's sole beneficiary--a notion ironically dispelled when the miser's servant writes his own name into his boss's blank will.

In this adaptation by Writer-Director Joseph Mankiewicz, Volpone becomes (in literal translation) Mr. Fox, a world-weary voluptuary (Rex Harrison) who lives a vita that is incredibly dolce in contemporary Venice. "My wealth," he announces, "is no more a pleasurable object of contemplation than my navel." To enliven his ennui, he decides to bring Volpone to life, casting himself in the title role. For his unfaithful servant, he hires an unemployed actor (Cliff Robertson) who has always wanted to play the palazzo.

Volpone's "dying" messages go out to three wealthy women: A loud-mouthed Hollywood actress (Edie Adams), a disdainful princess (Capucine), and a tough-talking Texan (Susan Hayward) who hates Venice ("All that water in those damn creeks"). In Hayward's wake comes a mousy nurse (Maggie Smith) who feeds her catty mistress sleeping pills every night.

During the unladylike squabble for Fox's fortune, Susan Hayward suddenly expires, felled by an overdose of Seconal. Abruptly, the spirited comedy becomes a murder mystery, with blind clues pointing to everyone. Not until the closing moments, when Fox himself dies, is the mystery slickly solved. Harrison wryly narrates the ironic finale from the grave, pointing out the parallels and discrepancies between Jonson's play and the film.

As a writer, Mankiewicz displays a literate, almost Shavian flair for dialogue. As a director, he has regrettably settled for interior settings--constant reminders to the audience that The Honey Pot was adapted from the stage. Like Fox himself, the film suffers fatally from indecision; wavering between comedy and suspense, it slips between them and relies too heavily on Harrison's fair-gentlemanly charm to cushion the fall. The device almost works.

The Honey Pot's sweetest moments come when Harrison is trading double entendres with his ex-mistress or pirouetting around his mansion like Nureyev on LSD. But even he cannot fix the film's flaws.

"What would be nice," intones Rex, in the film's final scene, "is if the bloody script turned out the way we wrote it." As the man in charge of both the typewriter and the camera, Mankiewicz has no one to blame but himself that it did not quite turn out the way he wrote it.

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