Philip Baker Hall didn’t make his first film appearance until he was pushing 40, which seems appropriate somehow: The growling gravitas he brought to dramas and comedies alike speaks to a full life lived, and experiences cultivated, before ever stepping onto a set.In Hall’s case, that life involved being born in Ohio, spending time in Germany as a translator for the U.S.
Army, and then pursuing the craft of acting onstage in New York and later Los Angeles. By the time he made the leap to film and TV, he had the kind of gruff mien that got him cast as cops and old soldiers. (In one season of “Quincy,” he popped up as a police captain in one episode and then a district attorney in another.)The role that put him on the map was a literal showcase: Robert Altman’s 1984 “Secret Honor” cast Hall as a disgraced, post-Watergate Richard Nixon, drinking and rambling as he looks back at his life, his career and his downfall.
It’s an adaptation of a one-man play, and Hall is never less than captivating in his monologue, capturing the former president’s bitterness and paranoia while also creating audience empathy for such a notorious villain.“Secret Honor” lives or dies entirely on Hall’s shoulders, and viewers who knew nothing about the actor stood up and took notice.
Roger Ebert put the film on his top 10 list of the year, cheering Hall for capturing Nixon “with such savage intensity, such passion, such venom, such scandal, that we cannot turn away.” Other critics agreed; Pauline Kael incorrectly assumed that this was “an acting feat by a man who probably isn’t a great actor,” but she also conceded, “Hall draws on his lack of a star presence and on an actor’s fears of his own mediocrity in a way that seems to parallel Nixon’s.
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