Secret Honor

Secret Honor
Secret Honor DVD cover
Directed by	Robert Altman
Produced by	Robert Altman
Written by	Donald Freed Arnold M. Stone
Starring	Philip Baker Hall
Music by	George Burt
Cinematography	Pierre Mignot
Edited by	Juliet Weber
Distributed by	Cinecom Pictures
Release date	September 15, 1984
Running time	90 min.
Country	United States
Language	English

Secret Honor is a 1984 film written by Donald Freed and Arnold M. Stone (based on their play), directed by Robert Altman and starring Philip Baker Hall as former president Richard M. Nixon, a fictional account attempting to gain insight into Nixon's personality, life, attitudes and behavior. It was filmed at the University of Michigan.

A disgraced Richard Nixon is restlessly pacing in the study at his New Jersey home, in the late 1970s. Armed with a loaded revolver, a bottle of Scotch whisky and a running tape recorder, while surrounded by closed circuit television cameras, he spends the next 90 minutes recalling, with rage, suspicion, sadness and disappointment, his controversial life and career in a long monologue.

Nixon's monologue often veers into tangents, often concerning his family, the people who made him powerful or the people who took him out of power. Nixon recalls his mother fondly, Dwight Eisenhower with hatred, Henry Kissinger with condescension and John F. Kennedy with a mixture of appreciation and rage. When Nixon gets frustrated or enraged at the person he is thinking about, the monologue often becomes disjointed; the passion overwhelms Nixon's ability for words. If he veers too far off topic, he tells the person who is supposed to transcribe the tape (an unseen character named "Roberto") to edit out the whole screed back to an earlier, calmer point.

Throughout the monologue, Nixon's description of himself changes. Sometimes he calls himself a man of the people, saying that he could succeed because he had known failure, just like the average American; he broods on his humble beginnings and the hard work he put in to rise to the top, and all the setbacks that he endured and overcame. However, the times when he talks about his own ideas and accomplishments in flattering terms tend to be brief, and they often bleed into self-pitying rants about how he is an innocent martyr, destroyed by sinister and hypocritical forces. Similarly, he can be self-deprecating or otherwise reflect a low self-image, but he rarely focuses on his own faults for long, preferring instead to blame others.

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