Dir: Penny Lane 85min US Doc Biopic
This fly on-the-wall portrait the Nixon administration is based on the archive Super-8 footage recorded by three top White House aides: HR Haldeman, John Ehrlichman and Dwight Chaplin. Gripping, well-researched and entertaining from start to finish, Penny Lane knows how to handle her material and present a documentary that is both informative and engagingly watchable.
Offering the fascinating real version of what the public was offered by way of news and media reports, it comes across as a straightforward, well-intentioned and insightful version of everyday events and was seized by the FBI during the Watergate investigation, and then forgotten for nearly 40 years.
Recreating the real story behind the perceived view it comes across as an engaging and often intimate expose – with voyeuristic footage often taken during State Visits following behind the President and his wife not only during the day but also in their ‘down time’; this is intensely personal and grippingly insightful stuff. MT