Billy Liar
Tags: fantasy, whimsical, flashback, psychedelic, melodrama, storytelling

Plot synopsis:
Billy Fisher (Tom Courtenay) works by day as a clerk in an undertaker's office but lives his dreams in his own imaginary world. He is having such a dream when the film begins in which he is a returning war hero passing through crowds of applauding people. He is soon brought back to reality by his mother's call for breakfast. He sits at the table to eat with his father and grandmother who tell him that he should grow up and live in the real world.Billy arrives late to work and is questioned by his employer, Mr Shadrack (Leonard Rossiter) about the disappearance of a large number of calendars that he was meant to deliver to clients. The calendars are in fact locked away in a wardrobe in Billy's bedroom.Billy is also engaged to not one but two local young women, the sweet and virginal Barbara (Helen Fraser) and the rough and ready Rita (Gwendolyn Watts). Unbeknown to both women, they share an engagement ring. It is the freewheeling Liz (Julie Christie) who has just recently returned from London however that Billy is truly in love with.Billy comes to hear that comedian Danny Boon is making an appearance in town and tries to show him a script that he has written but is quickly dismissed by Boon. Despite this, he still tells people that he is going down to London to write scripts for the comedian.Under pressure, Billy arranges a date on the same night with both Rita and Barbara in the same venue, the local dance hall. It is not long before Billy's double engagement is discovered when Rita sees the ring on Barbara's finger. He quickly makes an exit as a catfight ensues. Whilst on the upper level of the ballroom, he encounters Liz and soon leaves with her. As they are walking outside, Liz asks Billy to accompany her to London that evening. He accepts and heads promptly home to pack his bags. Billy's father (who has been trying to reach him by phone at the ballroom) tells him that his grandmother has been taken to hospital. Billy heads to the hospital en route to the train station where he finds his mother in the waiting area. It is not long after his arrival that they are told that his grandmother has just passed away. Billy tells his mother of his plans to go to London and continues on to the station.He arrives at the station and meets Liz. They board the train and Billy decides to rush back to the station to get them both a carton of milk for the journey. Although hesitant, he moves quickly but just misses the train. A disappointed Liz looks on from the window. The film's final shot sees Billy walking back up a dark and deserted road to the family home.

Review: Tragi-comic misadventures of a young man who invents a fantasy world as cover for his troubles and dreary middle-class existence in sixties Yorkshire.Billy Liar was always a terrific film, but like so many of its kitchen-sink contemporaries (Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, A Kind of Loving) it has actually grown in substance and depth since its release.
But looked at from the hindsight of 40 years he now seems symptomatic of what is today regarded as normal, almost aspirational, behaviour: self-absorption; avoidance of responsibility; glorification of celebrity; escape culture.Whether director John Schelsinger and writers Keith Waterhouse and Willis Hall foresaw all the cultural and sociological changes they captured is something only they would know (they surely couldn't have seen the significance of casting Julie Christie - one of the ultimate swinging sixties icons).
In fact I was able to appreciate it all the more on the second viewing.Tom Courtenay plays Billy Fisher, who is an immature, irresponsible young man living in a Walter Mitty-ish fantasy world, and invents implausible stories to attempt to hide his escapades, but his lies keep backfiring on him.His life is rapidly falling apart.
His grandmother is dying, his father is continually angry at him, and everything he does just makes matters worse.Fortunately, he meets Liz, (played by Julie Christie, who is the best thing in this great movie).
Effective slice of life comedy/drama tells the story of scared, optimistic Billy (Tom Courtenay) who lives in a fantasy world where he's always a hero.
Tom Courtenay and Julie Christie (Liz) leapfrogged to stardom with their performances but every actor is beautifully cast:  Mona Washbourne, Wilfred Pickles, and Ethel Griffies are the character types who give Billy's family heartbreaking nuances while Helen Fraser and Gwendolyn Watts bring a refreshingly sympathetic humanity to his polar opposite fiancees.
A splendid, for that time spirited, and very good looking Julie Christie as Liz the new-age young girl, with no ties or limitations (responsibility ?) whatsoever to withhold her from doing what she wanted to.
Hence, he seeks solance,affirmation and escape in his fantasies and lies, but ultimately we know which track he ends back on.Tom Courtenay is simply 'Billy Liar'.
It was mentioned that Albert Finney and Tom Courtenay, who have both played the title character on stage, were considered for the the film role at the same time.
As someone that was forced to read the book several times at school I find the material and the morals worn thin - especially when it was later turned in to a TV series and then a musical!(The reason why it is so popular is that is about the limits of (English) working class life and, and if  you are working class yourself, you are supposed to be able to "relate to it." Other suchlike novels (and later films) include Kes (which is better), A Taste of Honey (which is far better) and the Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner (which is even better still.)Good portrait of grey working class life in the sixties (if you are at all interested) and a template for a million films and television series to come (all barbs, mini jokes and evasions over the family breakfast table).
To think, this took place perhaps just months before the Beatles exploded on the scene; to me, it is a snapshot of how distressing the music and club world was before the British Invasion (yes, I know the British did not invade their own country).All the supporting cast are spectacular, from the old grandmother who doesn't understand why there are so many "Blackies" in town, to the two girlfriends, one an obnoxious bully, the other an annoying prude, to Billy's ever irritated father, who at one point calls Billy a "Mary-Anne" - oh dear!A particularly funny moment occurs when Courtenay has asked one of his girlfriends to go for a walk.
I loved Courtenay's performance and the style of comedy in the film(Billy as a soldier fantasizing about killing the annoying people in his life)is funny and original.
Tom Courtenay is colorless as a member of the British working class who daydreams his way out of the monotony of his life; Julie Christie is thoroughly charming as a local girl whose life really is a fairy tale.
Billy Liar (1963)Billed as a "gay" movie by TCM when they played this in 2017, and the basis for that is fair enough—director John Schlesinger was openly gay, and the feeling of this film is very much about being an outsider to a larger culture.
The flavor of it reminds me of "A Hard Days Night" and in fact they both come out of the so called British New Cinema.The film is imaginative in its structure, depending on the wandering thoughts of Billy to change the scene at will.
It isn't a question John Schlesinger's very fine film of the Waterhouse and Hall novel and play concerns itself with to any great degree preferring instead to take a sadly comic approach to Billy's predicament on the basis that he is fooling no-one, not even himself.Made in 1963 "Billy Liar" incorporated the trappings of 'the kitchen sink', (location filming in the grimy industrial North, real people filmed in real streets), to a Walter Mitty-esquire fantasy and if the fantasy sequences are the least successful things in the film, they don't really distract from the 'human' story at the centre.
Billy's a dreamer but, as the song says, aren't we all and Tom Courtenay's confident, likable performance in the title role gives the film a considerable lift.Indeed all the performances are first-rate, (even Finlay Currie's gruff old Counsellor); best of all was a luminous newcomer going by the name of Julie Christie who, in her few short scenes, stole the film from Courtenay and everyone else.
The rest of the time, he fights a losing battle with grim reality in the Yorkshire city where he lives, toiling as a mortician's clerk while dreaming of making a name for himself in London and lying whenever he feels threatened by reality, which is often.Tom Courtenay plays Billy as a mixture of dreamer and low-grade sociopath, drawing both our sympathy and scorn.
Taken from an even bleaker comic novel by co-screenwriter Keith Waterhouse, "Billy Liar" is an enigma of a movie, directed by a man, John Schlesinger, who liked to make enigmatic films.
A newspaper advertisement features an article about Billy with the headline: "Genius Or Madman?" When he's with one of the two young women he is presently engaged to, he imagines her slinking over to his bed in a negligee until his reverie is cut short when she catches his hand on her thigh.Schlesinger works the comedy more than the novel did, a good thing as "Billy Liar" needs a light touch.
"Billy Liar" unlike other British kitchen-sink dramas of the period, uses black humour and fantasy to put across its themes of thwarted ambition, the generation gap and revolt against conformity, with Tom Courteney, in the title role, superbly personifying if not teenage rebellion at least some sort of youthful angst as he strains to escape the confines of his stodgy, niggling, family, his literally dead-end job and last but not least his lack of a love-life.The device of Billy's "daydream-believing" of course dates back to James Thurber's Walter Mitty, only transplanted to the grim north of Britain with our (anti)-hero retreating to his make-believe world of Ambrosia where he fulfils every head of state and army chief position to boot.
The contrast with his day-job of being a clerk in a funeral director's business is obvious leading him to contemplate a migration to London egged on by the free-spirited Julie Christie, as natural and pretty here as she ever was, leading to the brilliant anti-climax of the inverted "Brief Encounter" ending.John Schlesinger's direction rises to the imaginative requirements of Billy's thought-processes, but equally knows when to employ quirkiness (the episode of the missing calendars) pathos, notably at the final scene and also during the scenes when Billy's bickering grandmother unexpectedly dies and of course humour.
But it's Courteney who essentially steals the show making it easy for us to identify with his character as we get inside his head and relate to his worm's eye view of the world only to share his final defeat as he retreats from his dream of escape to familial duty abandoning Julie Christie (whose knowing expression on the train as she in fact leaves him behind is superbly conveyed).Silly Billy, if you ask me..
Life and death.******** Billy Liar (8/63) John Schlesinger ~ Tom Courtenay, Julie Christie, Mona Washbourne, Wilfred Pickles.
He's surrounded by people who don't understand him, except for one: Liz (a glowing young Julie Christie), who like him is a free spirit, flitting in and out of the boring routine of Billy's home town.
But will Billy dare to take the step to make his dreams come true?A near-perfect script is brought to life by a cast of real characters, under the sure direction of John Schlesinger in glorious black and white.
In BILLY LIAR the title character, played to the hilt by Tom Courtenay, is a bored young undertaker's assistant who gets through each day by distracting himself with fantasies of personal grandeur.
As the three women in Billy's life Gwendolyn Watts as a bitchy, vulgar, nasty-tempered waitress, Helen Fraser as a sweet, old-fashioned somewhat dimwitted girl and Julie Christie as a tenderhearted bohemian enchantress add humor, pathos and downright magic to the story line.
Watts is the present (she wants to marry Billy and wants the ring now and has no particular interest in what comes next; her high-pitched and grating voice and mound of teased hair, her overall coarseness, reflect the dirty, ugly and noisy environment), Fraser the past (pre-60s chaste, softer hair, gentler voice, lost in her own visions of a perfect marriage with country cottage and two children), Christie the future (mop of straight, uncombed hair, "chuck tradition" attitude, let's go to London right now and start fresh, and by the way, I've been with other men but you don't mind, do you?).Novelist Keith Waterhouse captured this brief moment between the old era and the new and John Schlesinger translated it to film in the best way possible.
It's a pretty sad tale about a young man (Tom Courtenay) in a dead end job with an unhappy home life who lies and constantly escapes into a fantasy world.
Indeed, Beatlemania, the seismic cultural and social phenomenon that began in the same year that "Billy Liar" was released, is the primal scream that is palpable in this film and in the original Keith Waterhouse novel as well as in other works from this era.If we use the Beatles' early album as an analogy then the young stars of the film (Tom Courtney and Julie Christie particularly) are the band while John Schlesinger the director is akin to George Martin, the older but supportive mentor who recognises, embraces and is inspired by the revolution in the air.
Schlesinger's direction is inventive and fresh, thrusting the audience into the unnamed Northern town by shooting on location in the city centre and in the real suburban neighbourhoods where Billy (Tom Courtney in a breakout performance) and his friends live with their parents.We are also privy to Billy's constant retreats to Ambrosia, the fantasy country in his mind where Billy is king and loved by all.
Waterhouse, however, was using his anti-hero Billy Fisher to satirise not only the limitations of provincial life but also the conventions of "kitchen sink" fiction and drama.The film generally follows the plot of the book- Waterhouse acted as scriptwriter, along with his friend Willis Hall- but there are a couple of differences.
(Liz is more attractive in the film than I imagined her in the book; if Billy had been able to pull a girl with the looks of Julie Christie I doubt if he would have bothered with the likes of Barbara and Rita).There are good performances from Mona Washbourne and Wilfred Pickles as Billy's parents, Leonard Rossiter as his boss Mr Shadrack and Helen Fraser as the hapless Barbara.
Billy has to hide behind his lies because he simply doesn't know how to interact with other people.His constant daydreaming is the highlight of the film, hitting home the fact that he is living in his own fantasy world while he can't face the reality of his disappointing life.
His propensity to make things up and shrug off his responsibilities, however, leads him to end up dating two women at the same time (Helen Fraser and Gwendolyn Watts), though ultimately he dreams of escaping with the liberated Liz (Julie Christie).As a snapshot of Britain at a particular time, this is a valuable film.
The whole film is really good - affectionate, compassionate - about Billy Fisher's (Courtenay) gradual slide towards needing to decide whether he really is going to go to London to try to make his advanced powers of imagination into a career, or whether he's going to stay in the small town with this family.
Not a chance, for Billy's home country is 'Ambrosia', the fantasy world in which he is King, Prime Minister, one legged war hero and much more.Julie Christie is great as Liz, the carefree beautiful girl that Billy knows is just like him, or is she?This film is inspirational and full of great quotes, to please give it a try..
Look at what David Lean could do with Courtenay and Christie in Dr. Zhivago to see what competent direction looks like.By the time you get to the end (if you last that long), you'll know that Billy Fisher is lazy, self-centered and dishonest, but a lot of women like him.
There is nothing that makes him relatable much less minimally likable.Liz, played by Julie Christie, comes off as if she were either stuck at age 12 or another figment of Billy's imagination.
Director John Schlesinger chose instead of Finney who had played the part on stage, an entirely asexual-appearing Billy and coupled him with Julie Christie, the hottest British screen love-Goddess of the era, possibly of all time, as his love interest (and Courtenay as hers).
For a long time, I've been curious about seeing this British comedy/drama starring Tom Courtenay and, in one of her earliest roles, Julie Christie since I read that a short-lived TV series starring Steve Guttenberg called "Billy" from the late '70s was loosely based on this.
In this movie, directed by John Schlesinger, Courtenay is Billy Fisher who has an overactive imagination whenever things bother him which seems to be nearly all the time what with the demands he gets from his parents and grandmother, his doing unethical things at his undertaker job and getting caught, and his getting engaged to two very different women.
There's not much plot to Billy Liar, but Keith Waterhouse in writing the original novel and John Schlesinger in making the film were obviously paying homage to that most beloved of American fictional characters, Walter Mitty.
We thought it augured well for a revival of the British film industry but this was only partly fulfilled.All the actors were excellent and were given great opportunities in Billy's fantasy sequences.On the stage Albert Finneys performance overshadowed the others but in the movie there was a feeling of an ensemble presentation which was all to the good..
Made at a time when the British Cinema was heavily under the influence of the French New Wave directors," Bily Liar" is a rather plaintive movie about a young man in the North of England,naif and not so clever as he thinks he is,who sees his future reflected in the life of his parents ,desperately wants to escape from what seems pre - ordained but lacks the courage to make an irrevocable step into the unknown.
Opening the film with the music from "Housewives' Choice" was a stroke of inspiration.The camera moves up along a street with net curtains and we enter Billy Fisher's home.Here lives one of the greatest tragi-comic creations of the 1960s novel.Blessed with loving but uncomprehending parents Billy has seen how the real world works and wants no truck with it.
More extended fantasies show us Courtenay as dictator of his own nation -- Ambrosia.Later in the film we get to know Julie Christie's character.
An 8 out of 10 with Christie giving the best performance.Schlesinger made some interesting films in the early 60's (along with A Kind of Loving with Alan Bates) that really touch the pain of ordinary life with touches of humor and desperation.
The title character, Billy Fisher (Tom Courtenay), lives with his parents (Wilfred Pickles and Mona Washbourne) and grandmother (Ethel Griffies) in a boring North England town.
Although Tom Courtenay is the star of "Billy Liar" and gives an outstanding performance as this British version of a "Walter Mitty-like" character, it's a very young Julie Christie who steals the show.
Her part isn't large and her on-screen time is limited, but Christie's free-spirited carefree role changes the dynamics of the film and challenges Courtenay's Billy Fisher to do something with his life besides living in a complex fantasy world of his own making.
The final scene where Christie leaves alone on the train to London stays with you long after the final reel is over."Billy Liar" was Tom Courtenay's second major success after "The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner" was released the previous year.
Billy Fisher ( Tom Courtenay ), a bone idle young clerk at Shadrach & Duxbury's Funeral Emporium in the provincial Northern town of Stradhoughton, escapes from his humdrum life by retreating into a private fantasy world ( in which everyone looks like him ) called Ambrosia.
The acting is a little familiar (for those who can remember TV and films at that time) but good, with Tom Courtenay impressive especially at the end as he struggles to match leaving and staying at home, and living for himself.