[5] 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.

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".

...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.

The story unfolds impressionistically, skilfully blended with documentary passages and dramatic reconstructions and broken up, whenever it is in danger of becoming too solid, with satirical songs, newsreel snippets and title flashes.

While it ostensibly depicts a wide range of attitudes (in an eccentric amalgam of songs, vaudeville routines, cinema-verite discussions, documentary footage and conventional dramatic segments) toward the War in Vietnam, many are likely to view it as more of the recent flagrant anti-American propaganda from London and Paris and object violently.

[8]In The New Statesman John Coleman wrote:Peter Brook's Tell Me Lies, (Gala-Royal) is a well-meant talkathon, based on that Aldwych happening Us largely to the extent of retaining some pretty dire Adrian Mitchell songs.

It's a manner of mammoth home-movie in appearance and all too often in concept, with loyal and excellent actors from the Royal Shakespeare Company mixing it with 'real' talkers like Reggie Paget MP, Kingsley Amis, Peregrine Worsthorne, and Stokely Carmichael (all these interviewed by an earnest young man, Mark Jones, at a ludicrous party, where 'Zapping the Cong' is apparently a popular dance number).

What I continue to admire in it is a certain baffled concern for honesty: it touches in a fairly representative range of Anglo-Saxon attitudes to the near-and-far war, even if it makes many of them unconsciously ludicrous by its techniques of presentation.