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Very disappointing...

Sadly Over-hyped

It’s sentimental, ridiculously long and only occasionally funny

Blistering performances.

An adaptation of a stage play, "Secret Honor" is the tour de force performance of actor Philip Baker Hall. At the time he made it he'd had a distinguished stage career in New York but was barely known in movies and television. While he doesn't look or sound very much like Nixon he totally inhabits the character and rages around the set swilling Scotch and experiencing nearly every emotion you can think of.The story is of course totally fictional but in some respects Hall and the writers may have gotten closer to the core of who Nixon was than any other film ever did. Nixon is without a doubt the most enigmatic man ever to be President and "Secret Honor" is a fascinating study revealing what made the man tick.Even if you don't care for Nixon or political movies, this movie is worth watching for Hall's performance alone. There's never a moment in the movie, in which he's on screen every second, where he doesn't completely rivet the viewer's attention. The movie didn't make Hall a star but it started getting his name out. A young P.T. Anderson was a huge fan of the movie and later struck up a relationship with Hall which led to Hall appearing in a lot of Anderson's movies such as "Magnolia" and "Boogie Nights".

You know Godard was wrong when he said all you need to make a film is a girl and a gun. You just need a gun, a room and a talented actor.I just watched something I barely could believe was possible a great film shot in one room and with only one actor. Altman is a master of only using one set and creating great suspense and drama but here he just used one man: Philip Baker Hall. Now the whole thing is a bit stagey and wildly exaggerated, Hall also overplays at time but this is one guy in one room for 90 bloody minutes and it isn't boring! The story is rather good. A crushed Richard Nixon who seems to have gone insane rambles about some sort of Secret Honor and how he staged Watergate and about conspiracies while he throws out racial slurs and other forms of profanity. This results in quite a few pretty funny scenes but also a few quite emotional ones.The way Altman creates drama is by using the camera for everything it's worth and creating several genius shots. I won't claim it's perfect. A few bits are a little silly actually but this film is definitely great and I can't deny that creating something like this is a true work of pure genius.My rating is 9/10, depending on how you look at it the rating could be higher or lower. For pure originality it's a masterpiece without many peers that's for sure (though the limited resources makes it loose that title). I also want to praise the cinematography which I felt was quite good and rather before it's time.

During the late 1970s, Robert Altman started to get weird. 3 Women was wonderfully strange, and certainly more enigmatic than many of the films this maverick had released before, but nothing prepared me for the unhinged brilliance of Secret Honor when, thanks to Criterion, I was finally able to see it. I had become aware of the film sometime during high school, when I became obsessed, more or less simultaneously, with Richard Nixon, Philip Baker Hall, and Robert Altman. Obviously, then, Secret Honor would have to be some sort of Holy Grail for me. When I finally saw it, my obsessions with Nixon and Hall had waned, but my Altman fixation had only grown. How did I find this film? I found it miraculous. I simply cannot believe how awesome a filmmaker Altman truly is. He's masterful with ensembles (see Gosford Park, Nashville, and Short Cuts), but here he shows himself king of the one- man show. Philip Baker Hall is magnetic as a fictionalized Richard Nixon and puts Anthony Hopkins's swell performance to shame. Hopkins may have gotten the syntax and speech patterns down, but Hall, and his thoroughly beaten physical demeanor, seems to embody Nixon more fully. Hall is a fantastic actor, but Altman must have been doing something right to pull this performance--which is tragic and absurd in equal measures--from anyone, no matter how talented. It's the perfect pitch to play the film, as playing Nixon with too much or too little pathos would have killed the movie. The staging of Secret Honor is also a marvel. It takes place in one room, which instills a wonderful sense of claustrophobia, and this room is absolutely cluttered, it seems, by objects that haunt Nixon. It's an amazing design and fits the story perfectly. Secret Honor rests among the greatest Altman films--McCabe and Mrs. Miller, Nashville, the Long Goodbye, 3 Women, and Short Cuts--because it's not only a terrific film but also because it shows how masterful Altman is with a range of styles. It's simply brilliant.

The best film ever made on Nixon, or any president. A film which is an entire monologue by Philip Baker Hall, one of the best character actors of our time. While, like Anthony Hopkins, he doesn't LOOK like Nixon, his performance helps you look beyond it. As he staggers around the oval office, cursing his enemies and talking to ghosts, staring into his monitors, you get the resonance of the real Nixon, and you even begin to feel sorry for him. It opens the myth of Nixon wide to reveal a man beneath the icon, and is a simultaneously thrilling and dramatic film. Altman's film has been out of print for at least a decade, but it far surpasses Oliver Stone's film and is worth watching for anyone who ever wanted to appreciate Nixon as anything other than a monster.