Secret Honor (1984)

(Nixon home, California; contemporary)
IMDb

Disjointed ramblings. Those of Richard Nixon are the composition of this film. It's actually more of a filmed play, or one man show. But the production values aren't a fake looking set, this is more like something the American Film Theater did in the mid-1970's. Like Albee's A Delicate Balance. Anyway this came from the stage too, and Robert Altman saw the play, I suppose this would have been in 83' when it first came out, and the next year he made this. He made it with Philip Baker Hall, who played the same part in New York, and is the only man in the film, apart from the portraits that hang on the wall. Hall looks eerily like Nixon from some angels, and over all probably has the greatest physical similarity to the 37th president of an actor I've seen play him. He does a good job to, with the mannerisms, and the vocal idiosyncrasy's. He talks and to a lesser extent moves like Nixon. All the while ranting and raving into a tap recorder, with little stretches of calm, while fooling alternatively with a gun and a shot of whisky. Arresting performance, with some interesting speculation towards the end. Nixon had to destroy himself, he thinks, or he tells himself, for the greater good. Because he was being used and needed to stop being so, before he got worse, before they gave him a third term, Egocentric perhaps, but there's a certain kind of satisfying logic to it if you here it out. Such a Shakespearean figure was he, endlessly fascinating. I've always kind of identified with the man, there an excuse to psychoanalyse me as well. If you like to look into the dark side of a mans soul there's probably no better candidate then Nixon, he's close enough to us that we can't just write him off as an aberration, our at lest we shouldn't if we're honest with ourselves. I think there's some honesty to Secret Honor, if not always in the details of fact, at least in the spirit of it, in so far as can be garnered from this enigmatic man.