Billy Liar

Film studies has never properly reckoned with film performance. As its scholars are primarily concerned with the cultural symbology and influence of stars, what we don’t often get is a sustained reading of how performances work with the camera to change the meaning of films on multiple levels. Imagine Albert Finney – brusque, burly, and manic – rather than Tom Courtenay as Billy Fisher, better known as Billy Liar, and one immediately catches my drift. (Finney created the role on stage, with Courtenay subsequently replacing him.) In John Schlesinger’s film version of Billy Liar (1963) – scripted by Keith Waterhouse and Willis Hall from Waterhouse’s semi-autobiographical novel – Courtenay again took the role of the neurotic Yorkshire teenager of dubious integrity who cannot really stand up to life outside of the fantasies and pipe dreams swirling about in his head. 

Courtenay’s performance is universally celebrated, then and now, yet perpetually underrated. To me, it is one of the finest comedic turns in the whole of British cinema. There is a scene early on in which Billy saunters around the office of his employer, Shadrach the undertaker, making ridiculous noises while the boss is, unbeknownst to Billy, observing him from the doorway. The conceit is there, and very funny, in Waterhouse’s novel; what raises it to the heavens in Schlesinger’s film is Courtenay’s perfectly calibrated, inarticulate foolery, the addition of a dictaphone, and the breezy malevolence of Billy’s boss as played by the then-unknown Leonard Rossiter – himself giving birth to the first of a splendid line of comic creations. The sequence ends, shockingly, with a shot of the odious Rossiter being machine-gunned in the back; it turns out, of course, that this is merely Billy’s fantasy. This kind of comedy and performance doesn’t age: it could be brought off, with minute adjustment, in a film released in 2026. The same is true of the biting portrayals of Billy’s family life, all bickering and humiliation, and indeed the whole of Billy Liar which, despite its well-defined time and place, seems newer and fresher than virtually any of the pathbreaking films of the so-called “British New Wave”. Yet Billy Liar is attached to that movement of independent films by any number of umbilical cords, not the least of which are the distributors of the film, Nat Cohen and Stuart Levy, who were also responsible for Schlesinger’s A Kind of Loving (1962), a well-known “Kitchen Sink Drama”; and Courtenay’s BAFTA-winning turn in Tony Richardson’s The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner (1962) for Woodfall Productions.

One of the underrated achievements of the “Kitchen Sink Drama” and the capacious New Wave that followed it was the infusion of a new crop of British actors onto the scene of world cinema – actors who had had little or nothing to do with the studio films of the 1950s. Many will know how Albert Finney got his start in the movies, in Woodfall’s Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1960), but there was also Courtenay, Rita Tushingham, Alan Bates, Rachel Roberts, Charles Gray, Colin Blakely, James Fox, and many more: a soon-to-be rogue’s gallery of character actors of the international cinema scene of the ’70s. Several of these actors had not seen the inside of a proper film studio. Some were television actors. Several old hands (Roberts, Gray) had had one or two small parts in studio pictures before the New Wave propelled them to the forefront. And then there was Julie Christie, who sailed into the film version of Billy Liar, playing the part of Billy’s sometime girlfriend and ego ideal, Liz, on the strength of a supporting role in the Rank-distributed The Fast Lady (Ken Annakin, 1962), a mash-up of Carry On and the Ealing comedies. 

In Billy Liar, Christie appears onscreen as Liz for less than 14 (brilliant) minutes. Within about a year of the film’s rather successful debut in August 1963, Christie was shooting a film with John Ford; within about 18 months, she was starring in Schlesinger’s production of Darling (1965) opposite Dirk Bogarde; by the time Darling came out, she was wrapping up filming on Doctor Zhivago (1965) for David Lean. Upon that film’s release, she was fêted as a global superstar. Tom Courtenay experienced something similar on a rather smaller scale. By the time he, too, appeared in Doctor Zhivago, he was an established character actor in a variety of international co-productions. He found the film business tiresome and unsatisfying and, by 1970, virtually disappeared from it in order to concentrate on a greater love, the theatre. If Courtenay’s experience was, on the surface, rather more disappointing than Christie’s, it was Christie who bore the burdens of representation, celebrity, and typecasting. 

Christie’s Liz makes her freewheeling first appearance in Billy Liar as she spontaneously inserts herself into a supermarket advert. Christine Geraghty’s cultural reading of Christie’s star iconography is thus worth quoting at length: 

The 60s girl […] was a figure around whom the wheels of marketing were spinning and liberal commentators worried about […] the designs of big business and the media […] allowing little space for pleasure to be taken in the representation of the young woman. Yet the impact of Julie Christie in the role [of Schlesinger’s Darling] was enormous. Sarah Maitland […] speaks for many […] when she refers to Julie Christie as ‘the symbol of all my yearning adolescent hopes’. Christie herself, musing on the character she played, recalls that ‘she was extraordinary….Here was a woman who didn’t want to get married, didn’t want to have children like those other kitchen-sink heroines’ […] Christie’s star persona [and] her appearance in Billy Liar […] emphasised her impulsiveness, her lack of calculation, her overwhelming desire for freedom […] Christie’s image and performance […] suggest[ed] that feminine discourses of beauty and fashion are not the property of the Establishment but a way of claiming a feminine identity which can be used as a mode of self-expression, particularly around sexuality […] But the difficulty in maintaining the possibilities of identification for young women can be seen in the rapidity with which it turned into a stereotype.¹

I am inclined to reject the notion that Christie’s performance as Liz constituted an important contribution to the development of the trope of the “dream girl” or “fantasy girl” of the 1960s. For one thing, the trope hardly needed elaboration after successful American imports such as Billy Wilder’s The Seven-Year Itch (1955) with Marilyn Monroe. By 1965, the “dream girl” had become such a knowing cliché that it could be parodied as a sort of deus ex machina in Swinging London sex comedies such as Clive Donner’s What’s New Pussycat? and Stanley Donen’s Bedazzled (1967). Liz is, as I have said, Billy’s ego ideal, the living example of the possibility that freedom might be achieved in the all-too-real world of which Billy has, at least, a negative grasp. When Liz first appears in long shot, hitching a ride with a lorry driver as she returns to small-town “Stradhoughton” after another extended outing to parts unknown, the following close-up on Billy exposes not erotic longing, but undisguised admiration. “She just goes where she feels like! She’s crazy! She just enjoys herself.” 

Certainly, Liz is too good to be true for Billy, but that is because he has compulsively ruined the possibility of a meaningful relationship with any other woman – or man – in his life. John Cleese incessantly reminds us that what the great comic protagonists have in common is that they are appallingly bad people, or at least would appear so if we were unfortunate enough to meet them and get mixed up in their lives. Like many a teenager, Billy is a sociopath given to fascist fantasies: his imaginary country of Ambrosia, of which he is the President, is no democracy. He doesn’t merit the viewer’s sympathy or love, and so it is fortunate that, to paraphrase the Shakespearean scholar Harold Bloom on Hamlet, he neither needs nor wants it. Solipsism is a condition that can sometimes, for a short time, seem enviable; but the only thing that can objectively be said in Billy’s favour is that he is very young and that his sins are mostly of the petty variety. His sexual fantasies are restricted to his repressed girlfriend Barbara (Helen Fraser) – Liz is glimpsed only on the periphery of the frame – and are so tame as to make us doubt just how extensive Billy’s “relations” with the waitress Rita (Gwendolyn Watts) have been. We shouldn’t give Billy the benefit of the doubt, but if we do, it is because he is only a little less naive than the well-meaning but provincial Barbara, and thus finds his perfect foil in Rita, whose comedic virtue is to see right through him while seemingly, inexplicably, continuing to want him. 

While Schlesinger’s film is resolutely uninterested in getting us to condemn Billy, the constant object of our identification, neither are there any backhand or potentially irresponsible justifications; nor is it obvious to me that the viewers want Billy to get away with his chicaneries any more than they want him to fall flat on his arse. At best, we can perhaps generalise that viewers are not encouraged to want Billy to suffer any more than he already does at the hands of his own inept lies – which brings us back to Billy’s attitude towards the women in his life. Whereas the filmic version of Rita is presented as too abrasive to be an object of empathy, Billy’s guilt over his two-timing of Barbara – who is not quite “The Witch” of Waterhouse’s novel – is nearly as palpable as the guilt he feels towards his long-suffering mother (Mona Washbourne). Guilt, in Billy Liar, is a condition so instantly relatable and universally endemic to “middle class morality” that we can hardly dismiss it even in the face of the positive spectacle of freedom and self-empowerment that is Christie’s Liz: hence the ambivalence of the film’s famous climax, in which Billy turns down London and Liz in favour of a maternal guilt that is, perhaps, his best approximation of morality.

It is nevertheless the representation of Liz which best demonstrates what a miracle the film version is of tone, treatment, and adaptation. Schlesinger would later be guilty of replacing satirical wit with mere visual hysteria, yet Billy Liar is just hyperbolic enough to be funny and, for its time, cutting-edge. The fact that it was Schlesinger, and not Lindsay Anderson (a great director, not known for his comedic touch, who directed the stage version of Billy Liar), who was best suited to make the film version is attested by the early montage sequence of Liz freewheeling her way around the streets of “Stradhoughton” (actually Bradford, Yorkshire), a town showing signs everywhere of rapid commercial development. The sequence has no real parallel in the novel. Apart from its cultural significance as a feminine reimagining of the (sub-)urban flaneur, and the way it self-consciously sets up Christie as a cinematic force, it also establishes for us that Liz is the star of her own film running concurrently with Billy Liar, but unable to be shown in its entirety since it ranges outside of the provincial and class “situatedness” that delimits Billy’s existence and conditions his dreams. The incompatibility of these two people – despite their intimacy and genuine affection for one another – is underscored, gracefully, by the most consequential alteration to Waterhouse’s novel: the climax at the train station in which Billy runs out on Liz instead of the other way around.   

The location-shot montage of Liz’s Stradhoughton wanderings could not exist without the precedents of method, tone, and milieu set forth in Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner, and A Taste of Honey (Tony Richardson, 1961) – the infamous Woodfall Productions that form the spine of the so-called British New Wave. Over the objections of academic critics such as John Hill, who is prone to both overgeneralisation and misreading,² we can at the very least affirm that these compelling films opened up questions about class and sexuality that would inspire ever stronger elaboration (for example, in Ken Loach’s debut film Kes [1969]). With its skillful orchestration of staging, montage, and performance, and with its representation of Liz on the part of Julie Christie and John Schlesinger – perhaps the most successful gay director in the history of British cinema – Billy Liar may be seen as the perfection of the New Wave in the act of transcending it.

Billy Liar (1963, Great Britain, 98 mins)

Prod. Co.: Waterhall Films; Anglo-Amalgamated (distributor) Prod.: Joseph Janni; Jack Rix Dir.: John Schlesinger Scr.: Keith Waterhouse and Willis Hall Phot.: Denys N. Coop Ed.: Roger Cherill Mus.: Richard Rodney Bennett Art Dir.: Ray Sim

Cast: Tom Courtenay, Julie Christie, Mona Washbourne, Wilfred Pickles, Helen Fraser, Ethel Griffies, Leonard Rossiter, Rodney Bewes, George Innes, Gwendolyn Watts, Finlay Currie,  Leslie Randall, Godfrey Winn, Patrick Barr

Endnotes