You won't be disappointed!

This is a coming of age storyline that you've seen in one form or another for decades. It takes a truly unique voice to make yet another one worth watching.

The film may be flawed, but its message is not.

An old-fashioned movie made with new-fashioned finesse.

...who Richard Nixon was and every detail about the Watergate Scandal. But if you're under the age of, let's say 45 or so, you're pretty much screwed. No amount of Oscar caliber acting or great writing or incredibly inventive direction and editing can save a movie that is totally of its time. You will be lost despite the brilliance involved. It really is a brilliant film, but there is no exposition--it does assume that you know all about Nixon and Watergate. Back in 1983, everyone still did. Now, not so much.One dumbed down solution if you're Gen-X and younger: rent and watch "All the President's Men" with Redford and Hoffman first. Then watch the archive footage of Nixon speeches included in the DVD supplements. Then some of this will make sense.

Any individual is a puzzle, and Richard M. Nixon was no exception, rather living proof. To those who know him and his story (wether through a variety of books or personal experience or even through Oliver Stone's excellent "Nixon") this is a magnificent epilogue that instead of tying all loose threads together, reopens wounds and reformulates old and tired questions.The film is a mix of fragments of a complex and important life (one that helped shape the modern world) and an equally complex mind. Since only a very long (and impossible, given the obvious budget) running time could grace this with a tight sense of structure, the performance becomes the binding element, which is the key element of this picture. Whether you are interested in history, Nixon himself, character suffering, paranoia, film or acting, this is a must-see, if only for the brilliant performance by Philip Baker Hall. His portrayal of Nixon blows Anthony Hopkins's away in terms of accuracy and is a mighty challenger in terms of acting alone. He may be less sympathetic than Hopkins, but such was one of the real Nixon's flaws (in interviews the real Hall is quite charming!).Turning a play - especially a one-man-show - into a film is quite a challenge, but Altman, through simple yet effective means (notably the use of security-camera monitors and portraits), cranks up the intimacy and paranoia, ending the film in an uneasy and dark manner that would never be conceivable on stage.In fewer words, suffice to say that this unusual little film is in truth a giant in movie-making resourcefulness and talent. Unmissable.

**May Contain Spoilers**I just finished viewing this incredible, astoundingly intense motion picture for the very first time after hearing about it for 20 years. Philip Baker Hall (who played the character of "Library Cop" on "Seinfeld") essays the part of Richard Nixon in an unforgettable one actor performance. The film had been shot at the Univ. of Michigan, the crew composed largely of UM students, while director Robert Altman was doing a short hitch as filmmaker-in-residence there and has the interesting, "you are there" immediacy and intimacy of a filmed stage play or TV show.The set is a large, wood paneled office, apparently in Nixon's home in San Clemente, a few months after his August 1974 resignation from the Presidency. An angry and restless Nixon nervously paces back and forth with a glass of scotch whiskey in one hand and a loaded revolver lying on his desk, yelling angrily into a running tape recorder about the details of his childhood, adult life, controversial political career, his deep and unhealed resentments and miseries, repeatedly hurling a stream of caustic invective at portraits of Dwight Eisenhower, Jack Kennedy and Henry Kissinger, reserving most of his vitriolic (yet fascinating and perceptive) bile for Kissinger, rarely (typically) blaming himself for his own misdeeds, all the while intermittently and nervously scanning a battery of CCTV monitors whose cameras are already observing and recording him. Nixon on several occasions mentions the mysterious "Bohemian Grove" located in rural northern California (a subject of much "conspiracy theorizing" in recent years.) This film is a must see, if for no other reason to experience Hall's stunning and overwhelming performance as the desperate and doomed Tricky Dick, to appreciate Altman's unique cinematographic and directorial style and to vividly grasp the nature of an bafflingly influential human and cultural "focal point" in recent American history. Additionally, whether one is or isn't a Nixon hater, after finishing this film one may gain some understanding of and deeper insight into if not grudging respect or sympathy for this undoubtedly gifted and highly skilled yet incredibly tormented and angry man whose character, behavior and personality was a rare and corrosive but powerful and unforgettable blend of all of the tragic protagonists that had ever emerged from the works of Shakespeare, Dostoevski and Conrad to Fitzgerald, Beckett and Pirandello.Hall's Richard Nixon, like Marlon Brando's character of Col. Walter Kurtz in 1979's "Apocalypse Now" is a poignant and intense collage of what some might term a classic "American archetype;" a brooding and obsessive "failed overachiever" whose single-minded drive to reach that nebulous yet seductive goal of "being somebody" had been completely and irreparably derailed at the final bend by the same volatile forces that had also driven him relentlessly and vindictively toward that goal, leaving all sorts of tragic wreckage, human and political, in his wake. Was Nixon good, bad, both, neither or something else altogether? And finally, from the opening scene of "Secret Honor," a more specific and pointed question arises, one that persists all the way to the film's final two words: Is there a little bit of Dick Nixon in all of us?

A great film, if you can find it. I first saw it nearly ten years ago, and it still is fresh in my memory. This is a one man show (Hall is the only actor in the film) and an adaptation of a stage performance. The simple premise: Several years on from his disgrace, Nixon is in San Clemente and sits down with a bottle of Chivas and his old friend, the tape recorder, to spill his guts before he commits suicide. Hall is captivating in the role and his descent into drunken madness is a masterful performance. One of Altman's best. A bit of a history lesson, but one that is more interested in theater than in truth. Still, great theater reveals its own truths and there is plenty here to chew on.