When "Billy Liar" reached the screen in 1963 it was considered a little shocking, an innovative contribution to the British ashcan school of cinema, along with "Saturday Night and Sunday Morning", "Morgan", and a few others. The setting was always grimy and urban. The characters always working class. The conflicts were small and trivial to an outsider, and the treatment veered from comic to dramatic and back again, so that the audience was never quite certain about what was to come next or -- far more important -- how to feel about what they were watching. The characters were multi-dimensional, as characters are in life off the screen, and that's a compliment to the audience. People generally are not good or bad; they are good AND bad. Adults can make up their own minds about their responses, can't they?
This is a good example of the genre. Tom Courtenay is Billy Fisher. He works in an undertaker's establishment in some minor role -- mailing out annual calendars and so forth. He's juggling two women as well. One blond bimbo satisfies his physical needs while the virginal brunette offers him a future in which, with any luck, the wedded couple will live in a shabby flat in the same smoky industrial city and raise a couple of children who will grow up to be as unexceptional as they themselves are. The brunette wanders happily through a cemetery visualizing what THEIR plot will look like. This legerdemain confuses Courtenay, who doesn't care about his job anyway, and he begins to get into some mostly amusing hot water at work.
And so -- keeping two young women on the hook and in danger of being fired and not being particularly appreciated by his Mom and Dad at home -- Billy Fisher does what any sane person would do. He fantasizes. And we see clips of his fantasies unfold on screen.
Probably this was the most original feature of the movie -- the fantasies. There were no shimmering dissolves, no harp arpeggios, to let us know they were coming. Dad insults Billy and -- WHAM -- a cut to Billy firing machine-gun bullets into Dad. None are particularly amusing -- this isn't Walter Mitty -- but they're all kind of shocking. Of course, that kind of editing has been imitated a thousand times since then and we've grown accustomed to it, but it was imaginatively done by director Schlesinger, a genuine innovation. More extended fantasies show us Courtenay as dictator of his own nation -- Ambrosia.
Later in the film we get to know Julie Christie's character. She's a knockout, she sees through Billy's lies, and she wants to run away to London with him. At the last minute, when the couple are already seated on the train, Courtenay makes an excuse to leave for a moment and deliberately misses the train. The last we see of Julie Christie she is looking out the window of the departing coach in Courtenay's direction, her head cocked, smiling slightly, as if she'd expected him to abort the escape all along.
It's sad, in the end, despite the comic interludes. This is a story in which the system embodies a lifelong inertia, and the system wins. Courtenay will wind up with some wife who is full of bourgeois impulses, but then he was never very creative himself -- except for his daydreams.
This is a good example of the genre. Tom Courtenay is Billy Fisher. He works in an undertaker's establishment in some minor role -- mailing out annual calendars and so forth. He's juggling two women as well. One blond bimbo satisfies his physical needs while the virginal brunette offers him a future in which, with any luck, the wedded couple will live in a shabby flat in the same smoky industrial city and raise a couple of children who will grow up to be as unexceptional as they themselves are. The brunette wanders happily through a cemetery visualizing what THEIR plot will look like. This legerdemain confuses Courtenay, who doesn't care about his job anyway, and he begins to get into some mostly amusing hot water at work.
And so -- keeping two young women on the hook and in danger of being fired and not being particularly appreciated by his Mom and Dad at home -- Billy Fisher does what any sane person would do. He fantasizes. And we see clips of his fantasies unfold on screen.
Probably this was the most original feature of the movie -- the fantasies. There were no shimmering dissolves, no harp arpeggios, to let us know they were coming. Dad insults Billy and -- WHAM -- a cut to Billy firing machine-gun bullets into Dad. None are particularly amusing -- this isn't Walter Mitty -- but they're all kind of shocking. Of course, that kind of editing has been imitated a thousand times since then and we've grown accustomed to it, but it was imaginatively done by director Schlesinger, a genuine innovation. More extended fantasies show us Courtenay as dictator of his own nation -- Ambrosia.
Later in the film we get to know Julie Christie's character. She's a knockout, she sees through Billy's lies, and she wants to run away to London with him. At the last minute, when the couple are already seated on the train, Courtenay makes an excuse to leave for a moment and deliberately misses the train. The last we see of Julie Christie she is looking out the window of the departing coach in Courtenay's direction, her head cocked, smiling slightly, as if she'd expected him to abort the escape all along.
It's sad, in the end, despite the comic interludes. This is a story in which the system embodies a lifelong inertia, and the system wins. Courtenay will wind up with some wife who is full of bourgeois impulses, but then he was never very creative himself -- except for his daydreams.