New Movies: Tell Me Lies

Directed by England’s Peter Brook (Marat / Sade) and acted by the Royal Shakespeare Company, Tell Me Lies comes to the screen with impeccable artistic credentials. But the movie has barely begun its protest against the Viet Nam war before its righteous indignation dissolves into chaos.

Trying for Brecht but never being echt, the film is only a procession of skits, songs, dialogues and newsreels. The lack of story or order need not have been fatal; but the movie is inept even as psychodrama—or as pacifist propaganda. A Maoist girl (Glenda Jackson) quotes endlessly from the Chairman: “A revolution is an act of violence by which one class overthrows another.” Then she avows, with straight face: “I believe in China’s violent revolution, but I couldn’t kick a nun.” Sick jokes abound: “Saigon is the only city in the world where garbage stands on street corners and they burn people.” And symbolism: one scene shows the cast floundering in the mud of the Thames estuary—supposedly signifying the U.S. bogged down in Viet Nam.

The best sequence is a short scene with Stokely Carmichael, whose cool is chilling as he smilingly maintains that mankind’s only hope is for the colored races to smite the white devils like avenging angels. Later, a narrator weeps for Viet Nam-based U.S. soldiers, mostly of “Calvinistic background and Omaha upbringing,” whose first sexual encounters are “almost certainly” homosexual in the fag bars of Saigon. (The U.S. has plenty of problems in Saigon, but the fag bar is not one of them.)

From time to time the film interrupts its dreary pastiche to show two fairly funny film cutters. One of them muses: “Do you think they’ll show this in America?”

“Absolutely,” replies his colleague.

“How about in North Viet Nam?”

“No hope.”

“What does that prove?”

“Nothing.”

On the contrary, it proves everything, since the freedom to produce and show even this sort of movie is part of what motivates the U.S. in Viet Nam and elsewhere.