BILLY LIAR @ 60

A DJ reads out requests from listeners as women burst out of their north English houses to glory in being chosen. Cut back to the DJ whose boredom with his job is clear. Meanwhile, in just such a house under the eternally overcast sky, Billy Fisher is still in bed because his daydreams are more compelling than anything in his real life. That is crammed with nagging parents, angry concurrent fiancés, a stifling job in a funeral directors, and the whole stodgy dampness of a modern world that is still being designed by old people who can't forget the war. In his mind Billy is winning wars, marching in victory parades and giving speeches to crowds grateful to hear them. But the world he's escaped just keeps coming back to drag him out of bed and push him into the street.

Billy has spent his life plummeting into trouble. When he is forced to see that he's done it to himself he sprays the messenger with machine gun bullets from his fantasy life, turning suddenly from a small town youngster into a smoky faced commando. In moments away from these hazards he falls into self grandeur; walking past a football stadium he uses the roar of the crowd as the feedback at a political rally over which he presides with Churchillian speeches while dressed as a white-tunic dictator.

But can you blame him? At home he gets nothing but more pressure to squeeze into the breathless mediocrity of his job and there is under the thumb of his control freak boss. When he can't avoid one of the women he's engaged to, the other one is around the corner to harangue him. He's running around an England about to turn into the centre of the universe and he just seems to be going in circles, tied to a nail.

Then there's Liz. He sees her almost levitating along the street and lights up. He backed away from her offer to run off to France before and he's probably thought of it daily since. There's a dance on that night and he knows he'll see her there. She's not just there but waiting for him. They flee the stodgy conga line throng and talk in the dark of the park, It sounds like another daydream but it's real this time and she is ready to guide him away from the sandpit and into what is rapidly turning into swinging London. But this is a story not a documentary and nothing happens that simply. 

It wasn't until I was an adult that I saw this film. I'd seen the '70s tv show which was hilarious and hadn't known there'd been a movie. A flatmate in the late '80s was a big fan and I made a point of taping it when it was run on tv. It fed directly into my own life as a younger fantasist who escaped every situation, fuming and formulating impossible revenge for things I'd either shouldn't have been surprised by or had set up myself. John Schlesinger realised the novel and play that preceded his film with a story made for the screen with lightning flashes to fantasy sequences that feel exactly as a Billy Fisher would have experienced them. And then he keeps the timeline (of a single day) busy, the comedy timeless and punchy and the swelling sadness underneath it increasingly visible through the cracks.

He is greatly aided by a cast of emerging and established British talent, led by the perfectly chosen Tom Courtenay whose beat group looks are extended into such a restless creativity that demands a face, gait or accent for every turn. It is such an energetic and protean performance you can't help wonder how it all seems to settle without him seeming bratty or cute. It's that sadness again. As Billy is cornered by the dour longfaced world he instantly transforms into a machinegun wielding soldier, spraying bullets over every messenger of truth or responsibility he meets. It's hilarious but there's a cost to it, as well. 

As the embodiment of the freedom he has had to invent, Julie Christie dominates every scene she's in. Liz is a writer's conceit, an antithesis for the hero to draw him to heroism but Christie's luminous lightness veils the dangerous part of adventure and its danger that is far worse than the punishment doled out by the drab locals Billy pisses off. Her urbanity, world citizenship is intimidating through that very effortlessness which with she offers the keys to the wider world. British cinema at this time was growing into its role as social soothsayer, the era is even referred to as kitchen sink cinema, by which the persistent inequalities of U.K. life were examined to the point of cultural pain. Julie Christie's Liz is not the primarily sexual escape she might have been in another film, she is the future that was happening as the credits were rolling.

Months after its debut in British cinemas, Billy Liar had a kind of essential oil cover version in Dick Lester's film of Hard Day's Night. The black and white Beatles larking around might have been scripted to appear as a slightly heightened version of ordinary blokes but, really, the movie is everything Billy Fisher could dream of. And of course, it wasn't just them as the numbers of classic rock making groups rose, invaded America, and bloomed in a culture of youthful affluence minus national service, mini-skirts and discotheques, the pill and all night clubs. It's poignant that the song that Billy wrote with his friend is sung at the dance, it's a real thing he's done that could make his real life soar. It's an occasion for a visual gag of getting spotlighted as he's trying to hide but there is a real singer on stage and people are really dancing to Twisterella. We think of this as he is eagerly whispering plans to abscond to London with Liz. Shift it a few months and it would be on the same train as the Fab Four.

But Billy Liar is about how boring responsibility is or how stultifying the dreams used to escape it really are. There is a speech about gratitude that Billy is driven to shout as he counters his parents' oppression. It's a youthful response and an honest one to the constraints of a social order that requires a flat mouthed conformity. But if he keeps rerunning those same daydreams they will sour and turn bitter and by the time of his retirement sendoff he'll be creaking off home in a blackened rage. Tom Courtenay in an interview among the extras on my Blu-Ray of the movie revealed that he got to those lines about being grateful and found they filled him with such familiar anger that could dry up completely on stage when he approach them. It is to this film's strength that they bear the same weight six decades on.

This is a favourite of mine and, like Harold and Maude or Network, will always command my attention from opening to closing. It is made of the same truths that your favourite childhood books were and its sense of youth, playing, screaming and kicking at walls, is ageless.