SECRET HONOR

US, 1984, 90 minutes, Colour.
Philip Baker Hall.
Directed by Robert Altman.
Secret Honor is based on a play by Donald Freed and Arthur M. Stone. In fact, the screenplay of the film is strongly based on the play, confined to the one house. The film was directed by Robert Altman. This was the period when he was directing filmed players including Fools for Love and Beyond Therapy. This was surprising in view of Altman’s success during the 1970s with a whole range of films including mash, McCabe? and Mrs Miller, Nashville. However, Altman was to have a very successful career in the 1990s starting with The Player, Short Cuts, Kansas City, and culminating in such films as Gosford Park and The Home Prairie Companion.
This is a film about Richard Nixon, a monologue revealing his character, his politics, his crises. With Philip Baker Hall, who went on to a very successful film career as a character actor, the interpretation of Nixon is quite powerful.

1. The idea behind the film? Political mythology? Fiction and reality?
2. A filmed play? The rooms, the fluid camera, the table and desk, the pictures? Portraits and talk about them? Microphone and tapes and their evocation? Video and screens? The microphone as a telephone? Movement? Editing, the switch between video and actuality? The musical score and moods?
3. The work of Robert Altman and his career? This phase of filmed plays?
4. Philip Baker Hall’s tour-de-force? Visual, talk, remembering, impersonating, range of moods, the effect of the single takes?
5. The screenplay: the room, video, tapes, the introduction to Nixon, testing the tape, the errors, the vague speech, Roberto, talk and deletion? Monologue: content, Nixon’s life, growth, family, war experience, politics, in action, Hiss, Eisenhower, Helen Douglas, the Kennedys? The 1960s, the election? The committee of 100? China, funds, war? Conspiracies and pardon?
6. Screenplay and Nixon’s sanity, madness, drinking? Talking, tapes, the pictures? Acting as a lawyer? Yet gibbering? Anguish? Abuse, weeping, exasperation, language, swearing and the finale?
7. Audience attitude towards Nixon, in the eighties when the film was made to the later decades? The interest in him? Judgments? Facts and interpretation, hypotheses? Justice for him or not?
8. Nixon’s life, the American perspective, religious, family, values, power? Reputation for tricks? Humiliation? Power, control, excuses, his collapse?
9. The hypothesis of secret honor and excusing him?
10. Attitude towards his father, mother, the voters, brothers, his wife? Quaker influence?
11. His experiences with Alger Hiss and Chambers? Anticommunism? Accusations? Helen Douglas?
12. The Eisenhower era, vice president, his harking back to Lincoln and Washington?
13. His relationship with the Kennedys, the defeat by J. F. Kennedy?
14. The influence of Henry Kissinger, the war, the bombs, the Nobel prize, the Shah of Persia, biography?
15. The experience of Watergate? His being unmasked? The resignation? President Ford and the pardon?
16. An interesting film for American politics, ideals, reality, pressures, controls?
17. Money and deals? Corruption?
18. Prejudices, East Coast and West Coast? The experience of America?
19. Cynicism and reality? The effect of this 90 minute monologue? Insight? Sympathy or not for Nixon?