Secret Honor (1984)

You know Godard was wrong when he said all you need to make a film is a girl and a gun. You just need a gun, a room and a talented actor.I just watched something I barely could believe was possible a great film shot in one room and with only one actor. Altman is a master of only using one set and creating great suspense and drama but here he just used one man: Philip Baker Hall. Now the whole thing is a bit stagey and wildly exaggerated, Hall also overplays at time but this is one guy in one room for 90 bloody minutes and it isn't boring! The story is rather good. A crushed Richard Nixon who seems to have gone insane rambles about some sort of Secret Honor and how he staged Watergate and about conspiracies while he throws out racial slurs and other forms of profanity. This results in quite a few pretty funny scenes but also a few quite emotional ones.The way Altman creates drama is by using the camera for everything it's worth and creating several genius shots. I won't claim it's perfect. A few bits are a little silly actually but this film is definitely great and I can't deny that creating something like this is a true work of pure genius.My rating is 9/10, depending on how you look at it the rating could be higher or lower. For pure originality it's a masterpiece without many peers that's for sure (though the limited resources makes it loose that title). I also want to praise the cinematography which I felt was quite good and rather before it's time.

"Nixon as Hamlet, Nixon as Lear, Nixon as Blanche DuBois..." says Michael Wilmington in his Criterion liner notes. It's 1983 and Richard Nixon, late at night, is in the study of his home preparing to record his version of the events in his life. He's managed after some difficulty to connect the tape recorder. He has a tumbler of scotch at hand. As he talks he's at times playing defense attorney for Richard Nixon before an imaginary judge, at other times he's Richard Nixon explaining himself and his actions. "I wanted to be a winner because I was a loser. That's right. I'd been a failure every night of my life and that is my secret...I was a dogcatcher...yeah...I was...I am...and a...mmm...used car salesman, too...sure, sure, fine...and a siding and a shingle man and...because I knew that today the dogcatcher is king!...and all those crooks and those shysters and those mobsters and those lobsters...I mean lobbyists...and the well fed...all the welfare bums and tramps in this country...that is your palace guard. Let 'em suck on that for a while!" As the night goes by and as the scotch goes down, Nixon rails against almost everyone except his mother; against Eisenhower and Kissinger, against his brothers and his fate, against college slights and job interview turndowns, against east coast lawyers and slick big businessmen, against decisions he had to make to satisfy the secret deals he made with the Committee of 100 and the Bohemian Club crowd. Deep into the scotch he cries of the public humiliation he accepted to save his secret honor against the nightmare plans of the Committee and their smooth, wealthy, powerful members. "My client is guilty of one thing only," he cries to the imaginary judge, "of being Richard Milhous Nixon." This 90-minute play, restaged to become a highly fluid and effective film by Robert Altman, is an absolute tour de force of solo acting by Philip Baker Hall. He doesn't much look or sound like Nixon, but his performance is stunning. His Nixon ranges seamlessly from resentment to suppressed rage to self pity to almost strangled inarticulateness. He can relish his victories with a cynical laugh and almost sob with the slights he knows he has received from others. The four-letter words are pungent, startling and frequent. Hall is just extraordinary. What are we left with? I think that anyone who admires fine acting, psychology, politics and cynicism would want this film. I doubt if anyone who hates Nixon or loves Nixon would be satisfied. I found myself feeling a little uncomfortably sympathetic.

Made 11 years before Oliver Stone's "Nixon", with Anthony Hopkins, Robert Altman's direction of Philip Baker Hall in his gritty portrayal of Richard Millhouse on his last night in the Whitehouse, rehashing out all his problems over a bottle of scotch. Fumbling and bumbling around the office with tape machines and casting vague hints into the real motives and players behind the whole debacle. A very watchable and interesting film for anyone interested in Nixon/Watergate. A better film than Oliver Stone's version in spite of a much smaller budget.

SECRET HONOR should be seen by everybody with an interest in Richard Nixon. It may not be what he was really like, but it is a weird and unforgettable portrait of this man. Philip Baker Hall delivers one of the best screen performances I can ever remember in this one man movie. The movie takes place on the day before Richard Nixon is going to resign, and sits around drinking scotch and yelling into a tape recorder about everything in his political life. He blames Castro, Kissinger and anyone named Kennedy for all the problems in his life- while never accepting resposibilty for any of it himself. He's a man entrenched in denial. The movie utlimately makes Nixon look like an idiot- a man who has no idea what he was doing. This is one of Robert Altman's best films- an utterly amazing film.