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Eve Arden, Angela Lansbury, Shirley Knight, Lee Kinsolving, Dorothy McGuire, and Robert Preston in The Dark at the Top of the Stairs (1960)

Robert Preston: Rubin Flood

The Dark at the Top of the Stairs

Robert Preston credited as playing...

Rubin Flood

Quotes7

  • Executive: We sell new machinery. What do you know about drilling equipment for oil fields?
  • Rubin Flood: Not a thing.
  • Executive: Then why should we hire you?
  • Rubin Flood: You chew tobacco, mister?
  • Executive: I beg your pardon!
  • Rubin Flood: You talk crops and weather? You know who's had a baby lately? You know who goes to church and who don't? Who likes corn liquor and who likes store liquor? Who's a Republican, who's a Democrat?
  • Executive: Our methods are a little more modern than that.
  • Rubin Flood: Well, I'm telling you that the people out here are farmers, no matter how much oil they got in their land. You want to come out of this territory with a profit? You'd be better off taking that diamond stickpin out of your tie and putting a straw hat on the back of your head and a chaw in your cheek! You're gonna have to hunker down and talk business with a man who's cleaning out his pigsty. That's where a lot of sales are made... and it can't be done in a New York suit!
  • Rubin Flood: [To Lottie after he overhears her prejudice comments towards Catholics] Hogwash! Malarky! Horse manure! Woman you oughta get yourself a broom and ride over the housetops! You oughta buy yourself a sheet and poke two holes in it and go around setting fires! Or better still, get yourself a big piece of tape and put it over your mouth because you're too ignorant to live! Lottie sometimes I'm ashamed to be related to you even by marriage!
  • Ed Peabody: It's a new world, and we don't belong in it.
  • Rubin Flood: Any world I'm in, I belong in!
  • [Setting out to find a new job.]
  • Rubin Flood: Well, I sold everything else in my time. I guess I can sell myself.
  • Rubin Flood: Oh, you always got a excuse. But the plain fact is, a lot of time goes by without our making love. Cora, this is a marriage!
  • Cora Flood: There are other things in marriage.
  • Rubin Flood: Yeah, but the part I'm talking about is natural! It's normal and it's necessary! God planned it that way, and ain't nobody come up with anything better since Adam and Eve!
  • Rubin Flood: Reenie, you're at the beginning of things. These feelings are new to you. You want to get off on the right foot. I'm not talking about the physical side of things, I know you'll always be decent in the way you act. But a man wants to be met by a generous heart in a woman. A open heart. Honey, never be ashamed to say what you feel, and if you come to love a man, let him know it. Let him know all about it.
  • Rubin Flood: [about his car] You'd think this thing was an ice cream freezer the the way you have to keep cranking it all the time.

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