Tellingly subtitled A Political Myth, Robert Altman's film version of Philip Baker Hall's one-man show Secret Honor (1984) intriguingly imagines a disgraced Richard Nixon as he spends an evening raging against his dying political light. Smoothly framing Hall's actions through the two media that were the bane of Nixon's career (unflattering TV and even more unflattering tape recordings), Secret Honor mixes fact and fiction in a rambling yet compelling monologue suggesting Nixon was the victim of nefarious corporate greed as well as the paranoid, over-ambitious architect of his own downfall. Hall is no dead ringer for Tricky Dick, but he adroitly captures the distinctive hunch and infamous profanity. Alternately blustering, sobbing, and sputtering in frustration, Hall manages to evoke a whiff of sympathy for the man while pulling no punches about Nixon's crimes. Filmed at the University of Michigan for a class Altman was conducting, Secret Honor may have been one of Altman's cluster of 1980s theatrical adaptations, but its sharp interrogation of the Nixon mystique also makes it an apt companion to his 1970s dissections of American political and media mythology.