Secret Honor

Secret Honor (Criterion #257).
1984 Sandcastle 5 Productions & Janus Films.
Starring: Philip Baker Hall
Director: Robert Altman
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Robert Altman directed a film adaptation, shot at the University of Michigan during the director's stint as a professor at that school, of Philip Baker Hall's one-man show, which was written by Donald Freed and Arnold Stone.

Hall is Richard Nixon, restlessly pacing in the study of his New Jersey home, sometime after resigning as President of the United States. He also has a loaded revolver, a bottle of Scotch, and a running tape recorder (which Nixon has great difficulty operating at first), and while he's surrounded by closed circuit television cameras, he spends the next hour and a half recording a long monologue about his life and career, his mood ranging from rage and suspicion to sadness and disappointment. Nixon often goes off onto long tangents, usually about family members, the people who helped him on the way up, and the people who helped take him down. Often, Nixon becomes frustrated enough that what he wants to say becomes disjointed, as his passion overwhelms his ability for words. Whenever Nixon gets too far off topic, he tells the person assigned to transcribe the tape to edit it out back to an earlier, calmer point.

Over the course of the movie, Nixon continually refers to himself as an innocent martyr, who was derailed by sinister and hypocritical forces, and prefers to blame other people instead of himself for his faults. These tangents usually happen after he begins discussing how he worked to make it to the top, overcoming early setbacks, or talking about his own ideas and accomplishments. Nixon also dismisses the relevance of Watergate, claiming he never committed a crime, and how he was never charged for anything, and did not need or deserve a pardon from Gerald Ford. He believes that this forever tainted him in the public eye, because to get pardoned, Nixon must have been guilty.

By the end of his long rant, Nixon admits he had willingly been manipulated by a political network alternately refered to as the "Bohemian Grove" or the "committee of 100". The alleged interest of this committee is the heroin trade with Asia, and Nixon said he followed them out of lust for power, with any belief of their willingness to bring liberal ideas into Asia as an afterthought. Things changed in 1972, when the committee ordered Nixon to continue the war in Vietnam at all cost, then attempt a run for a third term in office in 1976, just so the committee could continue their heroin deals with the President as a strawman. Nixon claimed he decided he didn't want to go down in history as the President who sacrificed thousands of American soldiers for drug money, so he staged the Watergate scandal, as that was the only way to get out of office against the massive public support.

In the end, Richard Nixon again put the blame on other people: the people who supported him, even though he is a scam artist and petty thief.

Highly, highly recommended.