Six Films Featuring Richard Nixon as a Character.

Six films featuring Richard Nixon as a character.

By Matt Prigge
Add Comment Add Comment | Comments: 0 | Posted Dec. 10, 2008

Frost/Nixon

Made in U.S.A. (1966):

Combining ethical slipperiness with facial expressions and mannerisms that easily lend themselves to caricature, no modern American president has been as heavily portrayed as Richard Milhous Nixon. Even before his presidency he was a figure of satire, popping up in Jean-Luc Godard's pop-art noir spoof as the name of a killer (Jean-Pierre Biesse) who, alas, doesn't share his looks. Two decades later Godard would try to get Nixon to do a filmed chat with Norman Mailer. No dice.

 

Men of Crisis: The Harvey Wallinger Story (1971) :

Throughout the '70s one "Richard M. Dixon" (born James LaRoe) attracted a modicum of fame for his uncanny resemblance to Tricky Dick, a shtick he used in at least eight films. The earliest was Woody Allen's short TV movie, a mockumentary about a thinly veiled Nixon-esque administration that proved so scathing, PBS was bullied into shelving it. Good luck finding it now.

Secret Honor (1984):

During his heavily theatrical '80s period, Robert Altman filmed this bona fide one-man movie with Philip Baker Hall--that's Lt. Bookman to you--as a nutcase of Shakespearean proportions. Like most on this list, Hall doesn't look a thing like Nixon.

 

Nixon (1995):

But then, Anthony Hopkins really doesn't look like Nixon. Oliver Stone's burlesque doesn't much resemble his life or career either.

 

Dick (1999):

Though it's only fitfully hilarious, director Andrew Fleming's Gumpian redux of Watergate does feature the singularly surreal sequence in which dumb-as-bricks schoolgirl Michelle Williams fantasizes Dan Hedaya's Nixon, with whom she's smitten, riding a beach-side horse to the strains of "Lady Marmalade."

 

Frost/Nixon (2008):

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