“...You won't have Nixon to kick around anymore. Because, gentlemen, this is my last press conference....” (Richard M. Nixon, 1962)
Alas. When Millhouse: A White Comedy screened at the 1971 San Francisco Film Festival, Tom Luddy described it as “a film that has the courage of its political inentions. Filmmaker Emile de Antonio, a self-defined ‘radical scavenger' whose earlier films are models of political filmic integrity, sets out in Millhouse to confront one of the most reassured illusions of American society, namely its blind faith in the democratic character of our fabled ‘two party system.' Millhouse directs its attack on the rhetoric that disguises the institutional failure of the American electoral system to offer the people meaningful political choices, or even information. This attack takes the form of a devastating chronicle - compiled from newsreel and TV footage, and interviews with various political commentators - of the public career of Richard Milhous Nixon, perhaps the ideal example of a purely opportunistic politician whose very lack of personal conviction is a prime asset in today's politics of media manipulation.”