{"id":2829,"date":"2013-05-02T21:42:30","date_gmt":"2013-05-02T20:42:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.electricsheepmagazine.co.uk\/reviews\/?p=2829"},"modified":"2013-06-04T05:58:59","modified_gmt":"2013-06-04T04:58:59","slug":"billy-liar","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.electricsheepmagazine.co.uk\/reviews\/2013\/05\/02\/billy-liar\/","title":{"rendered":"Billy Liar"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"billy<\/a>
Billy Liar<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
\n

\nFormat:<\/B> DVD + Bly-ray

\nRelease date:<\/B> 6 May 2013

\nDistributor:<\/B> Studiocanal

\nDirector:<\/B> John Schlesinger

\nWriters:<\/B> Keith Waterhouse, Willis Hall

\nCast:<\/B> Tom Courtney, Julie Christie

\nUK 1963

\n98 mins\n<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

Billy Liar<\/I> (1963) stars Tom Courtney as Billy Fisher, a young man with an overactive imagination struggling to come of age in an industrial Northern city. He looks to escape his dead-end job at a funeral director\u2019s, his tangled love life and his oppressively ordinary family by escaping to London to become a scriptwriter. But what makes Billy Liar<\/I> a masterpiece of British Cinema is that it is not a classic Bildungsroman<\/I> \u2013a \u2018how I became a writer\/artist\/filmmaker story\u2019 \u2013 but a tragedy. It is the story of a flawed character striving to better himself, doomed to failure and to retreat into his imagination. It is also a painfully funny comedy.<\/p>\n

Billy is a product of class confusion. Having passed his eleven-plus and received a grammar school education, he finds himself alienated from his working-class parents, even though they live in a semi-detached house. He has none of the work ethic of his father or the know-your-place-in-society of his mother. ‘I’m not ordinary folk, even if she is,’ claims Billy. The class conflict is internalised by Billy as he flits between accents, from a parody of well-spoken RP to a Yorkshire brogue full of thees and thous. His two fianc\u00e9es also emphasise this conflict: Barbara is a nice but boring and unimaginative girl who Billy calls ‘Dwarling’ as they make plans for their cottage in Cornwall; Rita, a mouthy waitress who demands an engagement ring, claiming \u2018You don\u2019t handle the goods unless you intend to buy.’ Although he aspires to that classic middle-class dream \u2013 a job in the media \u2013 he is not prepared to work for it.<\/p>\n

Whatever you call it, either the British New Wave or kitchen sink realism, the brief period from the late 1950s into the 1960s (from Jack Claytons\u2019s 1959 film Room at the Top<\/I> to 1969\u2019s Kes<\/I>, by my reckoning) produced some great moments in British cinema. The films are wonderfully written. A concurrent literary movement, especially in the theatre, brought a mix of social conscience, comic wit and a new urge to tackle difficult issues to film writing. Many of the films were based on current plays or books by Keith Waterhouse, John Osborne, Alan Sillitoe, Shelagh Delaney and others. Yet despite their origins on the stage and page, kitchen sink films are very cinematic. Many of the directors had previously worked in documentaries and as part of the Free Cinema movement, which spawned Lyndsay Anderson, Karel Reisz and Tony Richardson. Their films were strongly influenced by French poetic-realism and a particular love of Jean Vigo. <\/p>\n

However, John Schlesinger was never really part of the Free Cinema movement. He had made documentaries, but had also worked in television directing episodes of Danger Man<\/I>. Thus Billy Liar<\/I> is less self-consciously \u2018poetic\u2019 and less gritty realist than A Taste of Honey<\/I> (Tony Richardson, 1962) or This Sporting Life<\/I> (Lindsay Anderson, 1963), and although a little slicker (at times looking like an Ealing comedy, with darker humour) and more openly \u2018entertaining\u2019, it is a brilliantly directed film. For a movie in which so little happens, the dramatic pacing is excellent \u2013 Hitchcock would struggle to put so much suspense into someone buying milk before catching a train. The performances are all exceptional, with Courtney\u2019s distracted nervousness as Billy nothing short of brilliant. <\/p>\n

From its opening travelling shots of British housing estates, from semi-detached to terraced houses, to rows of flats, the use of locations is stunning. Largely shot in Bradford, we see the city as it modernises, with wrecking balls bringing down the old and cranes building up the new. New supermarkets are opening \u2013 the world is changing. As the celebrity ribbon-cutter Danny Boone says, \u2019It\u2019s all happenin.\u2019 The fantasy scenes, however, were shot in Leeds, creating a somewhat lesser Kansas versus Oz dream\/reality contrast. <\/p>\n

Schlesinger\u2019s reputation has suffered over the years, culminating in his Party Political Broadcast for John Major, a grammar school boy who dreamt of becoming Prime Minister. It is tempting to subsequently look for evidence of this conservatism in his earlier works. His outsiders and anti-establishment characters are rarely rewarded at the end of films (1965\u2019s Darling<\/I>, 1969\u2019s Midnight Cowboy<\/I> and of course Billy Liar<\/I>) and are all certainly flawed characters. Billy and Darling<\/I>\u2019s Diane are incredibly selfish \u2013 Billy stops to pull faces at himself in a mirror when he is supposed to be hurrying to fetch his grandmother\u2019s medicine. \u2019You\u2019re idle and you\u2019re scruffy and you\u2019ve no manners,\u2019 Billy\u2019s mum tells him. But Schlesinger should be applauded for allowing such flawed heroes, and certainly for allowing the heart-breaking ending, which is amongst the greatest in cinema. Dreams are for dreaming, it tells us, not achieving. Anyway, if Billy had made it to London he would have spent the next 20 years writing sit-coms for Leonard Rossiter. <\/p>\n

The results of achieving your dreams can be seen in Schlesinger\u2019s following film, Darling<\/I>, which stars Julie Christie playing almost the same character as in Billy Liar<\/I>. Liz, the free-spirited, handbag-swinging object of Billy\u2019s desires, shows him the possibilities of escape and adventure. She has \u2019been all over\u2019, even as far as a Butlin\u2019s Holiday Camp and Doncaster, we learn. In Darling<\/I> she makes her entrance (although now called Diane) swinging her handbag as in Billy Liar<\/I>. She goes on to become the \u2018Happiness Girl\u2019 and an Italian princess, and thoroughly miserable.<\/p>\n

In some ways Billy Liar<\/I> is a film very much about the post-war period, the war still colouring Billy\u2019s imagination. In his dreams he is Churchill, or a general leading the victorious marching armies of Ambrosia, or simply machine-gunning his boss. And yet the film\u2019s appeal is timeless; Morrissey putting Tom Courtney on a record sleeve and air-machine-gunning the Top of the Pops audience helped another generation discover this classic, and I\u2019m sure there are enough good-for-nothing daydreamers around now for it to continue to resonate with audiences. <\/p>\n

I once watched Billy Liar<\/I> with a girl I was trying to impress. ‘And you can relate to this loser!’ she exclaimed at the end. ‘It\u2019s much worse than that,’ I told her, ‘this is the closest I’ve come to seeing myself in a film.’ It is a film for us underachievers, that shows what is means to grow up intelligent, imaginative, semi-educated and bone-idle. <\/p>\n

Paul Huckerby<\/B><\/I><\/p>\n

Watch a clip from Billy Liar<\/i>:<\/B><\/p>\n