Billy Liar
William Terence Fisher is a dreamer, a layabout, a man who has grown up in a northern industrial town and who has ambitions far beyond the limits of the valley in which he grew up but without the resources and connections to escape, playing fantasies in his head for an ever-appreciative audience of one, his parents Geoffrey and Alice despairing and funeral director Emanuel Shadrick increasingly suspicious of his employee’s tall tales and attitude towards his responsibilities.
Nicknamed “Billy Liar” by those who know him best, his latest ploy involves announcing he is moving to London to become a writer for comedian and personality Danny Boon, in town to open a supermarket, and while he dodges between two women, bright but brassy Rita and more down to Earth Barbara, both of whom believe they are engaged to him on a timeshare arrangement with the ring, Liz arrives back, the only woman who understands him.
Released in 1963 and directed by John Schlesinger, Billy Liar was based on the 1959 novel by Keith Waterhouse, starring King & Country’s Tom Courtenay in the role he had earlier been the understudy for in the West End theatrical adaptation, adapted like this screenplay by Waterhouse and Willis Hall, the novel and play set over a single Saturday and the play confined to the Fisher household but the film expanding across the unnamed town, dance hall, train station, tenements and graveyard, all shot on location in Bradford.
With Wilfred Pickles, Mona Washbourne and The Birds’ Ethel Griffies as Billy’s parents and his frail grandmother Florence who lives with them, Gwendolyn Watts and Helen Fraser are Rita and Barbara while a dour Leonard Rossiter is Shadrack, Rodney Bewes co-worker Arthur and, on the cusp of the stardom she would enjoy over the next decade, Julie Christie is Liz, in some ways a kindred spirit to Billy but unfettered by circumstance, free to enjoy herself and forgiving of his digressions and behaviours others begin to see as delusions.
In some way a counterpart to James Thurber’s Walter Mitty, portrayed by Danny Kaye fifteen years before, Billy Liar is a comedy of manners but a distinctly British one, class conscious and aspiring to prestige and respect, Billy ultimately aware that dreams are all he will ever have, impossible to realise for a man with no feasible means of escape from the life of his parents and peers, finding beauty and magic in the high street of an industrial town but his own worst enemy, unable to keep track of the lies which have long since replaced any notion of truth, a fool who tragically remains a fool and who disappoints himself most of all.
A tale of ordinary people getting lost in an indifferent world which echoes Schlesinger’s later Midnight Cowboy and Day of the Locust, joining StudioCanal’s Vintage Classics their new edition of Billy Liar is supported by two archive commentaries from Schlesinger, Courtenay and Julie Christie and from film writer Kat Ellinger, a conversation with Courtenay and Fraser, interviews with writer Richard Ayoade and musician Bob Stanley, a look at the Keith Waterhouse Archive and contributions from Alice Lowe, Danny Leigh and Samira Ahmed.
Billy Liar will be released as a 4K UHD and Blu-ray set on Monday 3rd August by StudioCanal
