Film Forum

John Schlesinger’s BILLY LIAR

John Schlesinger · 1963 · U.K.

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Screenplay by Keith Waterhouse and Willis Hall Based on Waterhouse & Hall’s play and Waterhouse’s novel Approx 98. min. Billy Fisher (Courtenay) is a feckless aspiring comedy writer with a rich fantasy life that takes him momentarily away from his dreary Yorkshire town, endlessly nagging family, a pompous boss (played by Kubrick fave Leonard Rossiter), and two fiancées. Then Mod, Mod Julie Christie beckons him to London... In Schlesinger’s adaptation of the smash hit West End play (from Keith Waterhouse’s cult novel), a speaker garbed in Ruritanian chic addresses cheering thousands in a football stadium and a ne’er-do-well undertaker’s clerk tries desperately to dispose of his firm’s advertising calendars. Of course, they’re both Tom Courtenay’s Billy, a would-be comedy writer with a rich fantasy life that puts Walter Mitty to shame. But enter old flame Julie Christie (!), introduced by a New Wavish, purse-swinging saunter through town. Alternately hilarious and mortifying, this is one of the finest—and certainly one of the funniest—of the Brit New Wave’s “stunted lives” sub-genre, with Billy’s ticket out being both Christie and a supposed scriptwriting gig in London. A British phenomenon, spawning a popular TV series, a sequel to the novel, and successful stage musical, BILLY’S international success cemented the careers of both Courtenay (“probably the best of Britain’s New Wave of actors” – Variety) and Schlesinger (here cameoing in the funeral sequence) as the champs of the frustrated working-class hero saga, with Christie’s dazzling turn springboarding her to superstardom. Nominated for six British Academy Awards and named one of the “100 Greatest British Films of All Time” in a BFI poll, rating higher than Schlesinger’s Oscar®-winning DARLING and A HARD DAY’S NIGHT. A RIALTO PICTURES RELEASE