Tell Me Lies, also known as Us, is a 1968 British documentary drama film directed and produced by Peter Brook. Based on the 1966 play US by Denis Cannan, it stars Mark Jones, Pauline Munro, Eric Allan, and Robert Langdon Lloyd. It was shot in London in the summer of 1967 and starred actors under contract to the Royal Shakespeare Company. The film looks at reactions to the American involvement in the Vietnam War and was highly controversial at the time of its release.
Contents
Plot
A young couple, Bob Lloyd and Pauline Munro, see a photo in a magazine of a baby mutilated by napalm and it changes their lives. They ask is London aware, is London concerned?
Cast
The majority of the cast play "guests" except where indicated:
Soundtrack
A soundtrack album, Royal Shakespeare Company – Tell Me Lies (Gregar GGS-5000), was released in 1967, with music by Richard Peaslee and lyrics by Adrian Mitchell.
Side one
"Tell Me Lies"
"Road Number One"
"Make and Break"
"Barry Bondhus"
"God is Flame"
Side two
"Escalation"
"The Leeches"
"When Dreams Collide"
"Rose of Saigon"
"Zapping the Cong"
"Any Complaints"
"Icarus"
Release
Tell Me Lies premièred on 14 February 1968 in New York, and on 15 February 1968 in London. It was originally intended to be shown at the Cannes Film Festival in 1968, but was not, being declared inappropriate in the political context of the time. At the Venice Film Festival, it received a special mention from the jury and was awarded the Luis Buñuel Prize.
Critical reception
The Monthly Film Bulletin wrote: A confused collage of politics and poetry, loosely held together by the attempts of a young couple, Mark and Pauline – appalled by the photograph of a grotesquely mutilated childi – to discover what they in London can do about the atrocities in Vietnam. Their quest takes them from protest demonstrations to a series of discussions – with a group of professional politicians, with a Buddhist monk resident in Hampstead, with left wing militants in Primrose Hill. And as they move about the city, the film itself moves from documentary reporting (shots of a Buddhist monk incinerating himself in front of an Esso station in Vietnam) to the stylised re-enactment of real events (Norman Morrison's last hours in Washington acted out with a minimum of histrionics against a London background), the stylised re-enactment of possible events (scenes in a homosexual bar in Saigon), fantasy (Mark's attempt to blow up the U.S. Embassy), and the biting satire of Adrian Mitchell's songs. Unfortunately, despite the sound Brechtian precedent for this kind of mixture, it irritates more than it stimulates.
The line between reality and fiction, or between reality and the artistic rearrangement of reality is constantly blurred: a party at which Mark engages in discussion with a group of writers and politicians, and Stokely Carmichael talks of the imminent destruction of the white race, degenerates implausibly into the orgiastic dance number "Zapping the Cong". But it is never clear whether Peter Brook intends this to demonstrate that seemingly rational statements by the war's reluctant apologists lead logically to the crudest extremes of hatred and violence, or whether he sees it as support for the thesis (implicit in the film's title) that we in London are in no position to learn the truth about Vietnam, so that the statements of politicians and the fantasies of theatrical producers have equal (and negative) validity. Certainly the film is as critical of English protest as it is of English politicians; yet its criticisms are curiously narcissistic. It denounces the middle-class, garden party atmosphere of British protest yet limits its scrutiny to middle-class protesters in N.W.3., making no mention of, for instance, trade union attitudes to the Vietnam war.
The film also seems critical of its characters' desire to "feel involved" without understanding the social significance of Chairman Mao's statement, delivered with great force by Glenda Jackson, that "a revolution is an act of violence by which one class overthrows another". Whereas the stage production of US ended with a vision of England shaken out of its complacency by revolution, the only image to emerge from Tell Me Lies is one of protracted impotence, ignorance and misunderstanding. Does Peter Brook mean to imply that there is no alternative to the situation he vituperatively denounces? Surely not, but this is the impression his film leaves.Kine Weekly said:This probing, thought-provoking film is constructed with great ingenuity and intelligence but is a little too long and complicated to sustain consistent interest. Its controversial ideas will stimulate sharp and conflicting reactions, making it a good attraction for specialist halls, particularly at university towns and cultural centres. ...Made in four weeks and financed by some seventy private individuals in America, the picture is a filmic extension and development of the Royal Shakespeare Company's controversial stage play US by Denis Cannan, with some of the players in their original, or similar, roles. Glenda Jackson is particularly striking as the Mao-ist.
Restoration, 2010–2012
In 2010, Peter Brook decided to track down his film, of which he had only a very damaged and incomplete 35mm copy. Through the intermediary of French screenwriter Jean-Claude Carrière, he made contact with the two foundations who had restored the complete film works of Pierre Etaix, co-written by Carrière. Archives were searched across Britain and Ireland, with film elements and a missing scene eventually found at the British Film institute. These elements consisted of 15 separate A and B reels, comprising the film's full 118-minute run time.
In December 2011, restoration began directed by Severine Wemaere, Director of the Technicolor Foundation for Cinema Heritage and Giles Duval, Director of the Groupama Gan Foundation. The exact look Peter Brook had created for the film in 1968 was accurately reproducedin the 2012 digital version.