TRAPPED: Robert Altman's SECRET HONOR (dir by Robert Altman, written by Arnold M. Stone, Donald Freed, starring Philip Baker Hall, 90mns, Cinecom, 1984)

President Richard M. Nixon and the Watergate scandal that lead to Nixon's resignation are fifty years behind us. 

Yet their echoes and rhymes bounce around American political hallways to this day.

Robert Altman's deep cut 1984 movie imagines a disgraced, resigned Nixon getting drunk in his study, half-recording, half-ranting a memoir/apology of his tortured life into a microphone to an unseen Cuban assistant named "Roberto".

All the while a gun sits on Nixon's desk.

Nixon is played by Philip Baker Hall (who many of us know better from his work with Paul Thomas Anderson and on TV) with a theatrical ferocity.

The "bigness" of the performance is at first jarring and seems too hot. But slowly either we the audience or the script or the story catches up to this approach and the last thirty minutes are riveting.

We're 3-4 generations past Nixon now and many people who watch the movie in 2025 won't be familiar with the nitty gritty details or even the man himself. It's an interesting realization. If you make a political movie, you might want to have one eye on a distant future where folks are going to have almost no frame of reference.

Therefore, the character, the story, the details have to communicate without the crutch of prior knowledge. As if you're making a movie for humanoid aliens who know nothing of United States history.

The ninety minutes that come at us are complex. The movie seems to affirm many of the rumoured traits of the real Nixon: alcoholism, paranoia, constant profanity, insecurity, rage.

Yet Nixon's furious stream of consciousness is also an inditement of the system itself. Raised by a Quaker mother, born poor to a childhood filled with its share of humiliation and tragedy, Richard Nixon was NOT to the manor born like a John Kennedy or Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

He didn't have family millions to fall back on. Instead, Nixon had to make deals with people who condescended to him but had the wallets and connections. Nixon constantly refers to the "Bohemian Grove" men or the "Committee of 100" who would finance and back Nixon as long as Nixon played ball with what they wanted-opening up Chinese markets, extending the war in Vietnam, etc.

“What would you have done?!” seems to be Philip Baker Hall’s rallying cri de coeur as Richard Nixon to a skeptical audience.

What Nixon tries to communicate in his confused disjointed drunken anger is that the political game is a game with the devil. And if you want the highest office, you're really just a puppet of shadowy powerful forces who prefer to be unknown and marionette compulsively ambitious insecure pols who desperately want the love of the people.

This writer isn't sure how much of what Nixon says here is based on historical record, how much is conjecture, how much Nixon delusionally made up to rationalize his own downfall, and how much is pure fiction.

And certainly the movie plays as Nixon trying to rationalize his humiliation as a kind of ultimate Christian act for the good of the country. Hence the "Secret Honor" and the public shame.

These passages are the most chilling. Because Nixon hints that there were plans for him to run for a 3rd term, not leave office, continue the war in Vietnam, and ultimately attack China via Taiwan to put a boot on the throat of the Soviets and fill the coffers of rich oligarchs. 

Thus, the disgraced President tries to convince us, he had to "invent" Watergate to distract the people and get kicked out of office. To stop the gears of a horrific plan he no longer wanted to be a part of. 

Altman shows his own craftiness and resourcefulness with limited means. This movie is a one person, one location adaptation of a play. Yet Altman uses a bank of four video monitors, a video camera, and a gun, to create a cinematic style that builds to a typically abrupt and shocking Altman finale.

Like politicians who find ways to stay in the game, Altman was a filmic survivor who found ways to put his stamp on small, intimate work in the 1980's until he could roar back with 1992's THE PLAYER. 

SECRET HONOR is a cornered wounded beast of a movie. But if you stick with it, the overall effect is rich and disturbing.

What really is going on behind the scenes in our halls of power? And are our leaders nutjobs from the beginning or does the process itself drive them mad however flawed they were to start?

Craig Hammill is the founder.programmer of Secret Movie Club