Repeated viewings of Billy Liar remind one that it's pretty bleak in parts, a study of mendacity, infidelity and familial dysfunction in a grim northern town. Saint Etienne’s Bob Stanley pops up in one of this disc's bonus features and points out that if you were to take out the fantasy sequences, “it’s a film about a bloke cheating on girlfriends.”
Keith Waterhouse’s 1959 novel had previously been turned into a successful stage play, Waterhouse and regular collaborator Willis Hall’s adaptation using a single domestic set. Working with fledgling director John Schlesinger, their screenplay opens up the action, the location footage shot in Bradford one of the film’s pleasures. This is the early 1960s and the physical changes taking place in the city centre, wrecking balls and cranes visible in many shots, mirror wider societal upheaval. You suspect that when Liz (Julie Christie, pictured below) gets off her train in London, the world will be in colour, not monochrome.
Albert Finney played Billy Fisher on stage but Schlesinger was right to give the part to Tom Courtenay, a nervier, scrawnier screen presence. His Billy is a twitchy teenage fantasist, a young man “who can’t say two words to anyone without telling a lie”, the action unfolding over a single hectic day when his chickens come home to roost. Billy dreams of escaping to London to become a comedy scriptwriter but works as an undertaker’s clerk. He's worried about the hundreds of company calendars he’s stashed away in a wardrobe, pocketing the stamp money instead of posting them, and how to deal with the two young women he’s proposed to, a single engagement ring shared between them. Wilfred Pickles and Mona Washbourne play Billy’s parents, irked that their grammar school-educated son is an underachieving embarrassment.
Billy takes refuge in his overactive imagination, dreaming of a parallel existence as the benign, heroic leader of Ambrosia, Schlesinger filling the screen with costumed extras. These asides are occasionally disturbing, as when Billy pretends to assassinate his family with a machine gun, though there’s a witty film-noir pastiche showing his imagined interrogation after being arrested for the calendar scam.
You can see the panic in Courtenay’s eyes as the noose tightens, trying to explain to the brassy Rita (Gwendolyn Watts) why he can’t give her the engagement ring, and attempting unsuccessfully to resign from his job, Leonard Rossiter superb as Billy's long-suffering boss. Things boil over at a packed ballroom, the two fiancées coming face to face and even Billy’s best friend Arthur (Rodney Bewes) telling him to grow up. A domestic squabble leads to tragedy. Escape seems possible with the help of Julie Christie’s radiant free spirit Liz, dominating the film despite only being onscreen for twenty minutes.
The coda is prefigured in a touching hospital scene, Billy’s mother overcome with grief after a bereavement, telling her son that she needs him at home. Though they want the best for Billy, it’s his parents’ incessant nagging that’s tipped him into delirium.
Despite its melancholy edge, Billy Liar remains one of the funniest and most quotable of British films. Courtenay’s unhinged soliloquy in the undertaker’s office is hysterical, as is a sequence where he and Bewes trade Yorkshire-isms as they stride past Bradford’s ornate Town Hall. Studio Canal’s HD print looks gorgeous, and extras include appearances from Alice Lowe, praising Schlesinger’s ability to portray the inside of Billy’s head, and Richard Ayoade, suggesting that the closing scene implies that Billy has finally grown up. Contributions from Courtenay and Helen Frazer appeared as extras on the previous BFI release but are still a delight, a twinkly Courtenay asserting that he got the part because he was “altogether more dainty” than Finney.
