Secret Honor

Richard Nixon, after his resignation, alone in his study. He has a whisky in his hand, a hard-to-operate tape recorder on the desk and the output of closed-circuit cameras on the wall. For ninety minutes he tries to record a text defending himself. The speech moves from defence to accusation, then to obscenity and a conspiracy narrative. There is nobody else in the room. Robert Altman directed. The source is a play by Donald Freed and Arnold M. Stone; Philip Baker Hall had already built the character on stage and brought it to the film. The production was unusually small for Altman. He was in residence at the University of Michigan at the time and shot it there using students as crew. The script barely departs from the play. The whole thing takes place in one room with one actor. Altman keeps the camera moving and uses the closed-circuit monitors to build a second point of view inside the room, so that Nixon is also seen as a man watching himself. Who it is for: viewers who like one-man performances and political portraits. Who it is not for: anyone curious about the real Nixon. The text is fiction and the explanation it offers for Watergate is literary rather than historical.