Secret Honor

The 1980s was an era when Robert Altman could not secure major financing from Hollywood studios to make feature films. This was partly due to the epic box-office failure of his Popeye and his mercurial reputation and hatred of movie producers. For most of the decade, he kept himself busy directing TV and stage plays, which he often transformed into films. Some were terrific, like Ed Graczyk's Come Back to the 5 & Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean and Herman Wouk's The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial; some were a mixed bag, like Sam Shepard's Fool for Love and David Rabe's Streamers, and some were complete failures, like Christopher Durang's Beyond Therapy. His television plays like Marsha Norman's The Laundromat and Frank South's Rattlesnake in a Cooler and Precious Blood (staged and released together as 2 by South) feature great actors doing interesting work. His most unusual project, Secret Honor, can certainly be described as a great actor doing interesting work, but beyond that, this tour de force one-man show is a baffling ninety minutes to sit through. I've watched it three times and always had the same experience of being riveted and fascinated for roughly the first half hour, nodding out somewhere during the second thirty minutes, and completely numbed by the time the credits roll.

Secret Honor is a filmed play shot in 16mm by Robert Altman and a group of students in a cinema class he taught at the University of Michigan in the sitting room of the school's Martha Cook Woman's Dormitory. The entire picture is the then-unknown actor Philip Baker Hall playing disgraced, resigned, and freshly pardoned Richard Nixon in a 90-minute monologue. Hall doesn't look or sound much like Nixon, but he commands the screen with his venomous presence. Restlessly pacing the study of his New Jersey mansion in the late 1970s with a loaded gun and a bottle of Scotch, the former president rants disjointed, delusional statements, dictating a memoir into a tape recorder while closed-circuit TV cameras and portraits of former presidents watch him closely. This is the movie that made Hall a leading man among character actors. He received much acclaim for his performance, though few people saw the film beyond the critics who championed it, like Pauline Kael and Siskel & Ebert. It wasn't until the Criterion Collection released a laserdisc of the movie that more people got to see it—including me.

Though it's now the most acclaimed, most remembered, and most widely available of the films Altman made in his decade of Hollywood excommunication, it's my least favorite (aside from Beyond Therapy, which by all rights should be hilarious but just lays there like a colorful, energetic corpse). Hall is a force to be reconned with, but the play itself, though deeply researched, peppered with historical details and references to speeches and policies, never coalesces into a dramatic framework. Written by Donald Freed and Arnold M. Stone as an attempt to gain insight into the mind of the former Commander in Chief, it never unlocks any great mysteries, answers any questions, or seems to draw any new conclusions about Richard Nixson as either man or statesman. We already know he was paranoid, neurotic, and vulgar. Altman's fondness for shooting his pictures with a meandering zoom lens has the opposite effect here as it does in his large ensemble films. The way the camera moves, the intercutting of odd angles, and the lingering on Nixson's bank of black-and-white monitors displaying multiple, identical, diminished versions of him feel less like a viewer discovering something previously hidden and more like a director compensating for material can't hold the viewer's attention on its own. I'm sure that's not the reason for the signature stylistic choices Altman applies here, which are the same as in most of his filmed plays, but that is how it often comes across in Secret Honor.