ianlouisiana Review of Billy Liar

Billy Liar (1963)

A journey of a thousand miles starts with a first step........................

[10/10 · 4 November 2005]

Made at a time when the British Cinema was heavily under the influence of the French New Wave directors," Bily Liar" is a rather plaintive movie about a young man in the North of England,naif and not so clever as he thinks he is,who sees his future reflected in the life of his parents ,desperately wants to escape from what seems pre - ordained but lacks the courage to make an irrevocable step into the unknown. He lives his fantasies in the imaginary "Freedonia" but is unable to make the stuff of dreams reality.An aspirant comedy writer he is given a vague offer of possible work in London by a visiting comic but will he settle for the devil he knows rather than the devil he doesn't? Opening the film with the music from "Housewives' Choice" was a stroke of inspiration.The camera moves up along a street with net curtains and we enter Billy Fisher's home.Here lives one of the greatest tragi-comic creations of the 1960s novel.Blessed with loving but uncomprehending parents Billy has seen how the real world works and wants no truck with it. The radio and TV performer Mr Wilfred Pickles has the role of his life as Billy's father.A man of his time,Mr Fisher senior expects his son to be a chip off the old block in the respectable lower middle class northern manner.Instead he seems to have sired an alien being. Together with "A kind of loving" this film dragged the north kicking and screaming from its whippets and Woodbines era when it appeared to be a satellite of eastern Europe.You cannot imagine Billy Fisher in a cloth cap. Mr Tom Courtenay is superb as Billy,sly,blustering, yet at the same time funny and endearing. When Miss Julie Christie turns up to further complicate his love life Billy finally decides to make that train journey south. There is an agonising scene played out at the railway station before the incandescently beautiful Miss Christie,as brave and optimistic as Billy is weak and doubtful,leaves without him. Trapped by his inner doubts,Billy presumably drifts off into a life of safe mediocrity,choosing to live a year like a lamb rather than a week like a lion.And that is so sad.