Secret Honor

Secret Honor is a 1984 American historical drama film directed by Robert Altman, written by Donald Freed and Arnold M. Stone, and starring Philip Baker Hall. It is based on the play by Freed and Stone, and follows Richard Nixon as a fictional account attempting to gain insight. It was filmed at the University of Michigan, in the Martha Cook Building's Red Room.

Plot

A disgraced Richard Nixon is restlessly pacing in the study of his Saddle River, New Jersey mansion in the early 1980s. Armed with a loaded revolver, a bottle of Scotch whisky and a running tape recorder, while surrounded by closed-circuit television cameras, he spends the next ninety minutes in a long monologue recalling with rage, suspicion, sadness, and disappointment, throughout his controversial life and career.

It often veers into tangents and concerns his family, the people who made him powerful or who took him out of power. Nixon recalls his mother fondly, Dwight Eisenhower with hatred, Henry Kissinger with condescension, and John F. Kennedy with a mixture of appreciation and rage. When Nixon gets angry at someone he is thinking about, the monologue often becomes disjointed. The passion overwhelms Nixon's ability to speak coherently. If he veers too far off topic, he tells the person who is supposed to transcribe the tape (an unseen character named "Roberto") to edit out the whole screed and go back to an earlier, calmer point.