Robert Altman

Secret Honor

Secret Honor

Sequestered in his home, a disgraced President Richard Milhous Nixon arms himself with a bottle of scotch and a gun to record memoirs that no one will hear. He is surrounded by the silent portraits of Lincoln, Eisenhower, Kissinger, and his mother, as he resurrects his past in a passionate attempt to defend himself and his political legacy. Based on the original play by Donald Freed and Arnold M. Stone, and starring Philip Baker Hall in a tour de force solo performance, Robert Altman’s Secret Honor is a searing interrogation of the Nixon mystique and an audacious depiction of unchecked paranoia.

Film Info

  • United States
  • 1984
  • 90 minutes
  • Color
  • 1.33:1
  • English
  • Spine #257

Director-Approved Special Edition Features

  • High-definition digital transfer
  • Audio commentaries featuring director Robert Altman and co-writer Donald Freed
  • Interview with actor Philip Baker Hall
  • Eighty-one minutes of archival-film excerpts from the political career of President Richard M. Nixon
  • English subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing
  • Plus: an essay by film critic Michael Wilmington

    New cover by Chang Park

Purchase Options

Director-Approved Special Edition Features

  • High-definition digital transfer
  • Audio commentaries featuring director Robert Altman and co-writer Donald Freed
  • Interview with actor Philip Baker Hall
  • Eighty-one minutes of archival-film excerpts from the political career of President Richard M. Nixon
  • English subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing
  • Plus: an essay by film critic Michael Wilmington

    New cover by Chang Park
Secret Honor
Cast
Philip Baker Hall
President Richard M. Nixon
Credits
Director
Robert Altman
Screenplay
Donald Freed
Screenplay
Arnold M. Stone
Executive producer
Scott Bushnell
Associate director
Robert Harders
Cinematography
Pierre Mignot
Editing
Juliet Weber
Camera operator
Jean Lepine
Art direction
Stephen Altman
Music
George Burt

Current

Secret Honor
Secret Honor

Nixon as Hamlet, Nixon as Lear, Nixon as Blanche DuBois, Nixon as Krapp—clutching every last tape to his breast with the wild fury and despair of a man on the precipice . . .

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Defending Your Life: Philip Baker Hall in Secret Honor

Performances

Defending Your Life: Philip Baker Hall in Secret Honor

A few dozen versions of Richard Nixon wrestle for control in Robert Altman’s portrait of the disgraced president, fueled by a lead performance of pure, unloosed spleen.

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Explore

Robert Altman

Director

Robert Altman
Robert Altman

Few directors in recent American film history have gone through as many career ups and downs as Robert Altman did. Following years of television work, the rambunctious midwesterner set out on his own as a feature film director in the late 1950s, but didn’t find his first major success until 1970, with the antiauthoritarian war comedy M*A*S*H. Hoping for another hit just like it, studios hired him in the years that followed, most often receiving difficult, caustic, and subversive revisionist genre films. After the success of 1975’s panoramic American satire Nashville, Altman once again delved into projects that were more challenging, especially the astonishing, complex, Bergman-influenced 3 Women. Thereafter, Altman was out of Hollywood’s good graces, though in the eighties, a decade widely considered his fallow period, he came through with the inventive theater-to-film Nixon monologue Secret Honor and the TV miniseries political satire Tanner ’88. The double punch of The Player and the hugely influential ensemble piece Short Cuts brought him back into the spotlight, and he continued to be prolific in his output into 2006, when his last film, A Prairie Home Companion, was released months before his death at the age of eighty-one.