Da: Technicolor Foundation for Cinema Heritage

Tell Me Lies is a melange of styles by the Royal Shakespeare Company which raises every imaginable argument against the Vietnam War (including the fact that we are transforming Omaha boys into homosexuals). The method is overtly Brechtian: there are songs, skits, interviews, and documentary footage. When released last year at the height of the anti-Vietnam protest (after the Pentagon, before the bombing halt, and during McCarthy’s New Hamshire and Wisconsin primaries), Tell Me Lies was righteously panned by the New York Critics, Stanley Kauffman of the “New Republic” summed up the case saying that “it was the wrong film at the right time”. The consensus was that Tell Me Lies was cheap politics, a black-white interpretation of the conflict which went for easy victories. By ignoring the complexities which cause an “enlightened”, “democratic” nation to slaughter the innocents, Tell Me Lies ultimately denigrated the doves as well as the hawks (As Green Berets was to do for conservatives later that year). Seen in the retrospect of one year, Tell Me Lies has a much milder effect. The film’s purpose is not so much to damn the West at any cost, but to present the anguish of the situation. But because Tell Me Lies represented all sides of the anti-Vietnam position – from realpolitik to the moral argument, it was bound to infuriate anti-war crusaders of every stripe. Tell Me Lies was not polarized; the audience was, and thus it received an unfair reception. […] There are many very good bits in Tell Me Lies: the reinactment of the last 48 hours of the life of Norman Morrison, a young Quaker who set himself a fire on the steps of the Pentagon; some straight talking on the war and racism by Stokely Carmichael; and a roll-call revue of 1001 Ways to Beat the Draft (“Fart the National Anthem”, “Pull out your dick and ask them if it will fit into the girls of the country you’re going to”), and of course the songs: Zappin’ the Cong, We Maim by Night, We Heal by Day and The Ballad of Barney Banshol (the Minnesota farm-boy who threw excrement in the Draft Board files).

Paul Schrader, Films and Vietnam, “Los Angeles Free Press”, February 14, 1969