BRITISH NEW WAVE: Billy Liar (1963)

DIRECTOR: JOHN SCHLESINGER
WRITERS:    KEITH WATERHOUSE & WILLIS HALL

Billy Liar is a deeply personal favorite of mine for so many reasons. The director, John Schlesinger, was one of the first openly gay movie directors. This was his second movie. The character of Billy Fisher is similar to me in more than one way, but, most importantly, we're both dreamers. Billy is played brilliantly by Tom Courtenay - it's one of his finest movie roles. Every actor in this movie is sublime and perfectly cast. The movie was also lovely Julie Christie's big break, one of the most luminous and talented of screen actresses.

Billy is a perpetual liar and day dreamer who probably today would be diagnosed with ADD. I think Billy is one the zaniest characters in movie history even counting all the ones Chaplin and Keaton played. In fact, I believe Courtenay's performance belongs in the pantheon of great comic performances on film; he'd played Billy in the original stage production replacing Albert Finney. Courtenay, unfortunately, wouldn't play a great screen character again until The Dresser 20 years later. He is completely charming here and vulnerable and bursting with youthful energy. This is a movie about being young and hopeful and dreamy and irresponsible: adjectives that describe Billy.

Billy Liar was the great gay British director John Schlesinger's second full length movie. Like other British New Wave directors Schlesinger had a documentary background. His first narrative movie, A Kind of Loving, starred Alan Bates, and like Billy both are considered part of the British New Wave. Schlesinger would go on to direct movies in Hollywood like Midnight Cowboy, The Day of the Locust and Marathon Man, earning a Best Director Oscar in 1970 for Cowboy. A former actor, like Robert Altman Schlesinger worked with many of the same actors over his career, and he launched the careers of Julie Christie and Jon Voight among others.

The actress who played Courtenay's girlfriend in his previous movie, The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner, Topsy Jane, was cast as Liz, Billy's free-spirited beatnik former girlfriend. She became ill or had a nervous breakdown during shooting or before production, depending on the source, and was replaced with Julie Christie who had been screen tested twice but was turned down. In an interview years after the making of Billy Liar Christie stated, "It was incredible because I was terribly, terribly, terribly well-received, I mean, ridiculously well-recieved in that part. And really I didn't do... I see it now, and it's not very good, but still, something happened." Schlesinger was impressed with Christie enough to cast her in his next movie, Darling,which along with Dr. Zhivago made her an international star, albeit briefly.