Finally saw this after decades of curiosity--it hasn't been easy to find. Well, curiosity sated, though I'd hoped for more than that. The original stage show/revue seems to be represented here mostly by songs that are either heard only on the soundtrack, or are sung to the camera in tight closeup by poker-faced performers. So their presentation is not engaging, and despite the fairly clever/provocative lyrics, the music itself is more Brecht/Weill with a hint of jazz (than, say, rock or pop), which was OK for "Marat/Sade" but feels wrong for a movie about an issue as then-current as the Vietnam War.
As is often the case with Brit progressive politics, there is a great deal of intellectualized hand-wringing and America-critiquing, as opposed to head-on confrontation with the issue of the war itself. So the film represents a particularly removed kind of activism, despite glimpses of actual protests--a great deal of time is taken up by people having dully earnest arguments with one another. Even the fact that occasionally these people are significant outsiders like Stokely Carmichael, or that the monotony is broken up by things like an appearance by the Open Theater, doesn't keep "Tell Me Lies" from being a very didactic, navel-gazing, emotionally unmoving sort of anti-war statement. It's not much more exciting than if one attended an academic seminar entitled "Is This A Just War?," and sampled a few speeches/discussion groups.
Some of the actors are intriguing enough that I wish I'd seen them play other roles onstage. Glenda Jackson is not very prepossessing here (certainly not a fraction so much as she'd already been in "Marat"), though she does get to briefly demonstrate a nice singing voice.
In sum, this is a supposedly "radical" yet oddly middle-class theater experiment made into a not very successful movie that is irksomely self-conscious about all the above, as well as being a "semi-documentary," with people more or less playing themselves. Taken as a statement of anti-war solidarity, it's an admirable effort, but that's about the most you can say in its favor. Among the many, many more-effective cinematic commentaries about Vietnam in the era, a European perspective is articulated with much more vigor and variety by the multi-director omnibus "Far From Vietnam," which also got restored in recent years. A qualifier: The version I saw seemed to be about 20 minutes shorter than the official maximum runtime, though it's hard to imagine a LONGER "Tell Me Lies" would be less tedious.
