Rex Harrison credited as playing...
Cecil Fox
- 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: I'm not surprised you failed as an actor, your timing has all the sensitivity of a stampeding buffalo.
- 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: [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.
- 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.
- Cecil Fox: Spare me the modesty of your desires. Piffle! "I like simple things" means usually I can't afford what I want.
- 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.
- 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: 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.
- 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: Your profession suits you well, nurse Watkins. You have a bed pan's eye view of life and nature.