Secret Honor

Robert Altman directs Philip Baker Hall in a tour de force performance playing a brooding Richard M. Nixon, with only a tape recorder, a bottle of scotch and his private thoughts and obsessions to keep him company. Altman’s filmed adaptation of Donald Freed and Arnold M. Stone’s unsettling, fictional stage drama is a hypnotizing profile in abnormal psychology and a meditation about recent American history by way of Samuel Beckett. “There’s a virtuoso naughtiness about the sureness of Altman’s touch …a small, weird triumph” — Pauline Kael.