Ajtlawyer An adaptation of a stage play, "Secret Honor" is the tour de force performance of actor Philip Baker Hall. At the time he made it he'd had a distinguished stage career in New York but was barely known in movies and television. While he doesn't look or sound very much like Nixon he totally inhabits the character and rages around the set swilling Scotch and experiencing nearly every emotion you can think of.The story is of course totally fictional but in some respects Hall and the writers may have gotten closer to the core of who Nixon was than any other film ever did. Nixon is without a doubt the most enigmatic man ever to be President and "Secret Honor" is a fascinating study revealing what made the man tick.Even if you don't care for Nixon or political movies, this movie is worth watching for Hall's performance alone. There's never a moment in the movie, in which he's on screen every second, where he doesn't completely rivet the viewer's attention. The movie didn't make Hall a star but it started getting his name out. A young P.T. Anderson was a huge fan of the movie and later struck up a relationship with Hall which led to Hall appearing in a lot of Anderson's movies such as "Magnolia" and "Boogie Nights".

tieman64 "You, ladies and gentlemen of the American jury, shall look at the face that is under the mask!" - Philip Baker Hall (Richard Nixon) It takes 12 minutes for Robert Altman's "Secret Honor" to really get going, the audience having to endure some terribly dated TV music and lots of theatrical posturing by Philip Baker Hall, but once the actor begins his meaty monologue, it's hard not to be transfixed.Hall, of course, plays former president Richard Nixon. Recently disgraced by the Watergate fiasco, he prances about his private office with a loaded gun and a glass of whisky, spewing scorn at the Kennedy's, Helen Douglas, Henry Kissinger and a mysterious group called both "The Committee of 100" and "The Bohemian Grove".Employing students from the University of Michigan, and a script that sticks religiously to a stage play by Donald Freed and Arnold Stone, "Secret Honor" is a fairly small scale project for Altman. Still, there are at least four interesting things being done.The first is the film's location. Altman doesn't use his small set with the same gusto that Stone does in "Talk Radio", Hitchcock does in "Rear Window" or Lumet does in "12 Angry Men", but he does add his own little flourishes here and there. For example, Altman surrounds Nixon's room with wall-mounted pictures of past presidents and places a huge bank of security monitors to one side. The effect is such that Nixon, whose monologue takes the form of a courtroom plea of defence, is addressing a jury that is at once himself, we the audience and those political figures he both admirers and detests. There's therefore a sense of profound scrutiny, Nixon waging a war for his own innocence, politicians over his shoulders, a security camera in his face, a national audience behind his back and a bank of monitors recording his every move.The second interesting thing is Hall's performance itself. Unlike Stone's "Nixon" or Ron Howard's "Frost/Nixon", "Secret Honour" is categorically not an attempt to portray some "ultimate truth" of Nixon. Instead, Altman creates something more fragmented; a creature with different faces, facets and feelings. Altman demonizes as he humanises, deconstructs as he constructs, each of Hall's anecdotes serving only to further muddy the water. Altman's Nixon is both raging bull and wounded child, Altman content to create a portrait that is as baffling as it is complex.The third interesting thing is Nixon's insistence that it was a mysterious group of powerful figures who orchestrated and mismanaged his career. He calls them "The Bohemian Grove", a cadre of economic power brokers to whom Nixon is nothing more than a paid lackey and perpetual outsider. Even as he damns them, Nixon mourns that he was never fully accepted by this group. The fourth interesting thing is Nixon's insistence that he staged Watergate deliberately in an attempt to get himself out of office. This claim is filled with ridiculous reversals. The honourable president made himself guilty, he says, committed a deliberately obvious crime, not because he was a paranoid, power hungry mad man, but because he was too noble, too just and great, to associate further with the cartels, criminals and deplorable politicians who were pulling his strings.Watergate thus shifts from becoming a criminal act, to an act of nobility. Nixon, the man so used and abused that he had to sacrifice his own career for the greater good. Poor boy.7.9/10 – This is essentially filmed theatre. Still, Hall delivers a fascinating monologue that is both riveting and demented. Incidentally, Altman pretender Paul Thomas Anderson would use actor Philip Baker Hall extensively throughout his filmography, casting him in "Sydney", "Magnolia" and "Boogie Nights". Worth one viewing.

MisterWhiplash Richard Nixon, a man known for many things, amongst which trying to reach out to the "silent majority" of America, while plunging the country further into war and getting into one of the big cover-ups of the nation, is given a character here. It's not necessarily the man altogether, but like Oliver Stone's Nixon, it's an interpretation given a blood-life by way of Donald Freed and Arnold Stone's script (which is maybe the 2nd best thing about the film), Robert Altman's peering, sometimes paranoid, but tight compositions, and Philip Baker Hall. This actor is one of the unsung masters of character acting, even when he sometimes can only just be 'himself' in the roles. Here his inhabitance, more than portrayal, of Nixon captures (as Antony Hopkins did in his own way) the soul of the man dead-on.It's a one-man film, so that Hall's work here has to be better than top-notch, it has to be engrossing. Nixon as a political being, family man, lawyer, and practically professional liar, are given shape here by his near-movie length confession into a tape recorder. This could be a tricky thing for Altman and Hall to pull off, but for pretty much the entire film they do. One thing I loved was how sometimes Altman would cut-away from his actor and get shots on Nixon on the security monitors installed in his office/room (where he spend the duration of the film in). There were also some very evocative, powerful shots of Hall as Nixon reflected against the window, this being even closer to Nixon- a ghost or some other entity- than Hall.But in the end, even for all that Altman could do (which is really just to let the camera roll and maybe give Hall a word or two when needed), it is really Hall who has all the credit going for him here. What works best about what he does here is the time he takes, how his acting is made almost like music- he'll speed up, get frustrated/angry/cynical in his own sometimes scrambled recollections of the past, then slow down in self-shame asking to erase parts of the tape (to whomever may be listening, if at all). Here is a man whom in real life was a smart man, but also paranoid to a fault, with as many personal demons as detractors, and who could always be counted on to be pushing forth a lie to the American public. Hall gives him life here, in this "fictional" account as a tortured, flawed, drunken leftover of days gone by. That sometimes it becomes even more moving than expected, and revelatory, makes it all the more clear why it still remains Hall's landmark in his career (among others, like in PT Anderson's films), and that for Altman it's dark, brooding, and like a Bergman film, does NOT make it's doomed subject into a one-dimensional being.

noel-1 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.