The Return of ‘Billy Liar,’ a Timeless Classic About a Recognizable Fantasist

The history of cinema is full of liars and conmen, with just a few movies featuring these tricksters as lead characters including “The Talented Mr. Ripley,” “Catch Me If You Can,” “Liar Liar,” and “The Sting.” One of the best but most forgotten pictures, centered on a fabulist, is the 1963 British comedy drama “Billy Liar,” starring a young Tom Courtenay and directed by John Schlesinger (“Midnight Cowboy”). Hilarious, fascinating, and spry, the black-and-white movie has been buffed into 4K brilliance to mark the 100th anniversary of the director’s birth, and film fans and fibbers alike will do well to catch it at the Film Forum starting today. Mr. Courtenay plays Billy Fisher, a twenty-something single child living with his parents and grandmother in a quaint-but-modernizing Yorkshire city. Billy begrudgingly works at a funeral home where he pilfers petty cash intended for mailings, fancying himself a writer despite almost nothing to show for it. His social life is primarily taken up with his two girlfriends, Barbara and Rita, to both of whom he is engaged, and neither of whom, of course, know anything about his philandering. With Billy turning in his notice at work, his girlfriends expecting to meet his parents soon, and a former sweetheart (Julie Christie) showing up in town, the film’s plot chronicles how his lies unravel over the course of a fateful day. While he wishes to be a writer, telling everyone he has a job lined up in London with a known comedian—a lie, of course—what he most imagines himself to be as he idles away his time is a kind of military prime minister, an almost authoritarian leader of the country of “Ambrosia.” So our Billy is also a fantasist, a daydreamer in the tradition of “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty.” These dreams and others always involve some ego trip or triumph over adversity, such as when he pictures himself going to prison for his work misdeeds yet the tale turns into one of redemption when he pens a book while incarcerated called “I Have Paid.” Billy’s revelries are his way of escaping from his provincial surroundings and middle-class/middlebrow upbringing. His parents consider themselves “ordinary folk” though he rejects this description for himself. Indeed, the character even envisions machine-gunning his parents and others who challenge or annoy him, reminding me of a scene in Todd Solondz’s disturbing 1998 cult classic “Happiness.” Yet Billy remains charming and even loveable, despite the occasional violent fantasy, on account of the perceptive screenplay by Keith Waterhouse and Willis Hall based on the former’s novel, Mr. Schlesinger’s sympathetic direction, and, last but not least, Mr. Courtenay’s ace portrayal of a clever but insecure young man.Most viewers will recognize Billy as a type of callow smart alec, the kind who does impressions and different accents — his Winston Churchill is very amusing — as well as other, generally harmless shenanigans. As he tells Barbara when he comes clean about a few lies, he “has a very vivid imagination.” But imagination is one thing and compulsive lying another, and it is the latter that gets him in trouble. In a key sequence before the film’s third act, he attempts to avoid both Barbara and Rita at the local nightclub in order to spend time with Ms. Christie’s character Liz. It is a night of real triumph for Billy as the band performs a song he wrote with his coworker, a ditty called “Cookie Twisterella.” His moment of glory, though, turns sour when he encounters his two fiancées and they encounter each other. Mr. Schlesinger expertly maneuvers the various moments of this humorous, ironic set piece, shot in CinemaScope like the rest of the film.Although often labeled as an example of English “kitchen sink” drama, the movie isn’t about a working class “angry young man,” despite Billy’s imaginary outbursts and a few scenes in the kitchen of the comfortable Fisher home. As a protagonist, Billy is too educated and droll, and his goal of writing a novel too lofty to count as social realism. Unlike some films of that genre, “Billy Liar” feels fresh due to its irreverent but “honest” coming-of-age framework, which not only allows for satirical asides on bourgeois values and the fusty ways of an older generation but also acute observations of the sexual mores of the early sixties. A maturing youth naturally seeks intimacy, like in many pictures about “growing up” as well as British realist dramas, and Billy is no different. Yet his attempts to have a sexual encounter prove laughable when one considers his engagements to two women, and the lengths he goes to with chaste Barbara. It is Liz who signals the sexual revolution to come, and Ms. Christie is utterly transcendent in the role that made her a star. In another key sequence, Mr. Schlesinger captures her gallivanting down bustling streets while swinging a handbag, with some pedestrians unaware of the camera crew but conscious of this striking, carefree young woman. A clear homage to the French New Wave, the enchanting interlude contains both documentary-like details and fictive vignettes, such as when she’s selected to help inaugurate the opening of a new supermarket. As the only figure who understands Billy’s fantasy world and encourages him to go to London with her, Liz is instrumental in triggering our hero’s personal crisis in the third act.Some might dismiss her character as nothing more than a manic pixie dream girl, yet Ms. Christie imbues Liz at times with an almost jaded, world-weary quality, one that would gain a cruel intensity just two years later in her Oscar-winning role in Mr. Schlesinger’s follow-up film “Darling.” That film’s portrait of the “Swinging Sixties” in London is literally and figuratively miles away, nightclub scene aside, from the traditional settings in “Billy Liar”: a suburban home, funeral parlor, tea room, caff, cemetery, and, heartbreakingly at the end, a train station. Still, the director manages to depict a changing England, one in which Blacks hold important jobs (Billy’s grandmother is quick to notice), motorcycle gangs are present, and old buildings are bulldozed. Billy’s eleventh hour quandary occurs after said grandmother is taken ill, and in many ways the character’s journey is symbolic of the country’s uneasy relationship with modernity and love of nostalgia. This nostalgia connects with Billy’s fantasies, and even his lies at times have an element of wistful wishfulness. One need only look at the recent case of Cambridge professor Jason Arday to see how myth and delusion live on in parts of British society. At the end of the film, Billy doesn’t seem to have changed or gained much wisdom. It’s a testament to Mr. Schlesinger’s wonderful work that we don’t really want him to. Billy will continue to conjure up heroic scenarios in a dreamland that we can all recognize.

The Return of ‘Billy Liar,’ a Timeless Classic About a Recognizable Fantasist

The Return of ‘Billy Liar,’ a Timeless Classic About a Recognizable Fantasist

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