enjoyed the great Philip Baker Hall in Robert Altman's Secret Honor tonight--

"In order to find another performance like it in cinema you have to go all the way back to the full-bore theatricality of a Charles Laughton or John Barrymore; actors who thrived on the knowledge that, whether on stage or on film, every eye in the house was trained on them. There is, in fact, a more than tiny resemblance between Hall’s Nixon as he rages maniacally from one end of his study to the next — as though trying in vain to outrace his thoughts — and the feral performances Barrymore gave in films like Twentieth Century or Hold That Co-ed. It’s not a species of camp or old-school hamminess of the George Arliss variety that Hall engages in. What he recaptured through his Nixon was a spirit of luminous madness that had been refined out of screen acting (generally replaced by more dour histrionics); crucified upon a cross of joyless nuance by otherwise fine directors like Elia Kazan — and many more not-so-fine ones. By taking Nixon to both comic and tragic extremes, by playing him to that proverbial hilt, he achieves the rhetorical truth Freed and Stone were aiming for, that they knew was there all along..."