Billy Liar

BILLY LIAR   ***1/2

John Schlesinger

1963

IDEA:  Stultified by his home life and job in his dreary Northern England town, pathological prevaricator Billy Fisher recedes into his fantasies.

BLURB:  If you condensed the disaffection, restlessness, temporizing, imprudence, egoism, and waywardness that often attends young adulthood – specifically one in early 1960s working-class England – you’d come up with Billy Liar’s Billy Fisher as the model specimen. The Angry Young Man played by Tom Courtenay is a quintessential avatar of a generation on the precipice of a sea change, as well as an enduring icon of all things anxious and liminal about being young and directionless. While Courtenay’s Colin Smith from The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner is diligent and arguably principled in his willfulness, Billy is a floundering hodgepodge of feckless decisions and evasions, someone whose fantasies and non-commitments serve as defense mechanisms against the prescriptions and expectations of a staid reality. We lament his chronic irresponsibility but understand his position, which is not fostered so much by character deficiency as the dead hand of society. Such social critique is crucial to Billy Liar as it is to its British New Wave brethren, but it’s neither the thesis nor the film’s most affecting element. What ultimately makes Schlesinger’s work resonate is its complicated, timeless character study, and the poignant suggestion that Billy’s overdue answering to filial duty might also, paradoxically, be yet another means of prolonging the fantasy of escape.