This is John Schlesinger’s much-loved British comedy from 1963, based on the 1959 novel by Keith Waterhouse, itself part of the now almost forgotten Angry Young Man movement of which John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger and Kingsley Amis’s Lucky Jim were the other two classic texts – though perhaps it is really only Osborne’s hero who is actually angry.
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.
But Billy has a complicated love life (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 Julie Christie, 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.
And it is this final act of nerve-loss that has always soured me on Billy Liar, despite its massive reputation. I am heretically unenthused about the film, which I have written about before, as it appears to me finally to have a strange unfunny loyalty to unhappiness and defeat which 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 Liar again, I’m 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 I still can’t bring myself to join in the chorus of praise. It is however a lovely performance from Courtenay, an enduringly amazing actor who is still doing outstanding work right now.
• Billy Liar is in UK cinemas from 31 July.
