John Schlesinger’s much-loved British comedy from 1963 remains a landmark study of a young man caught between everyday life and extravagant invention. Based on the 1959 novel by , and part of the now almost forgotten Angry Young Man movement alongside John Osborne’s
Look Back in Angerand Kingsley Amis’s
Lucky Jim, it sits in a tradition of postwar British fiction about frustration, class tension and self-invention, though perhaps it is really only Osborne’s hero who is actually angry.
Who is Billy and what drives him?
Tom Courtenay plays Billy, a cheeky, naughty young man who is as daft as a brush and lives semi-permanently inside his own Walter Mitty-ish fantasy world. Amis’s Jim Dixon had his own propensity to indulge in micro-imagined situations to get him out of whatever mortifying little class-based humiliations he found himself in. Billy lives at home in Yorkshire with his mum and dad and works as an undertaker’s clerk, of all the banal things; he takes refuge in his reveries, chiefly the fiction that he is the ruler of a bizarre Ruritanian land called Ambrosia, perhaps named after the brand of rice pudding. Billy wants to be a comedy writer, and he is, after all, the experienced comedy writer of preposterous situations that are happening inside his own head.
How complicated is Billy’s love life?
Billy’s romantic life is tangled, though we can assume that as a nice young unmarried man he is still a virgin. He has recklessly proposed to two separate women: shy Barbara (Helen Fraser) and Rita (Gwendolyn Watts). But there is a third woman in his life: the gobsmackingly beautiful Liz, played by , and the sheer implausibility of this pairing means that the film almost has the air of science fiction. It is Liz who encourages him to try his luck in London – but Billy loses his nerve.
Why has the ending always troubled the reviewer?
It is this final act of nerve-loss that has always soured the film for the reviewer, despite its massive reputation. The writer is heretically unenthused about
Billy Liar, as it appears to have a strange unfunny loyalty to unhappiness and defeat that is quite at odds with the aspiration of Billy’s comic fantasies. It is at odds also, as it happens, with the reality of Keith Waterhouse’s own experiences of getting out and getting on and, for what it is worth, Courtenay’s experiences too, as detailed in his superb autobiography
Dear Tom: Letters from Home. On revisiting
Billy Liaragain, the reviewer is prepared to concede that the ending, in its paralysis and shame, might relate specifically to Billy’s actual lying, not merely his fantasies: his silly and self-destructive fibbing to those two other women. But the reviewer still cannot bring themself to join in the chorus of praise.
What is said about Courtenay’s performance?
It is however a lovely performance from Courtenay, an enduringly amazing actor who is still doing outstanding work right now. Courtenay gives a beautiful performance as the undertaker’s clerk who nurses preposterous ambitions, even if the film is too quick to surrender them.
The combination of Courtenay’s work, Schlesinger’s direction and the film’s place in British cinema keeps
Billy Liarat the centre of discussion, even for a critic who remains resistant to its ending and its emotional logic. The film’s reputation is acknowledged as massive, but the response here is still a notably sceptical one, tempered by admiration for Courtenay’s enduring craft and the film’s enduring place within the era’s literary and cinematic landscape.
