Billy Liar Review – Tom Courtenay is a classic about a boy’s high school education and his troubled dreams | Video

This is John Schlesinger’s beloved British comedy from 1963, based on the 1959 novel by the author. Keith Waterhouseitself part of the now-almost-forgotten Angry Young Man category of which John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger and Kingsley Amis’s Lucky Jim were two other classics – although perhaps Osborne’s only hero is angry.

Tom Courtenay plays Billy, a goofy, rude boy who is as silly as a brush and lives permanently in his own Walter Mitty-ish world. (Amis’s Jim Dixon had his own tendency to want to do a little thought-out to get him out of the embarrassing classroom experiences.) Billy lives at home in Yorkshire with his mum and dad and works as an undertaker’s clerk, of all things banal; he takes refuge in his prayers, especially the myth that he is the ruler of the mysterious country of Ruritania called Ambrosia (probably named after a type of rice pudding). Billy wants to be a comedian, and, after all, he’s a comedian who knows a lot about the problems going on in his head.

But Billy has a complicated love life (although we can assume that as a good single guy he is still a virgin). He casually proposes to two different women: shy Barbara (Helen Fraser) and Rita (Gwendolyn Watts). But there is a third woman in his life: Gobsmackingly beautiful Liz, he played with Julie Christieand the sheer impossibility of this combination means that the film is almost science fiction. It’s Liz who encourages him to try his luck in London – but Billy gives up.

And it is the last act of loss of nerve that upsets me about Billy Liar, despite his great reputation. I didn’t like this movie, which I wrote earlieras it appears to me at last to have a strange strange loyalty to the displeasure and defeat which is at odds with the desire of Billy’s fantasy. It’s also at odds, as it happens, with the reality of Keith Waterhouse’s experiences of coming out and boarding and, for what it’s worth, Courtenay’s experiences, as described in his excellent biography Dear Tom: Letters from Home. When I meet Billy Liar again, I’m willing to admit that his end, in paralysis and shame, can have more to do with Billy’s actual lying, not just his imagination: his stupidity and the self-destruction of the other two women. But I still can’t commit to joining the chorus of praise. Still, it’s a treat from Courtenay, an amazing actress who’s still doing great work right now.