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.

BRITISH NEW WAVE: This Sporting Life (1963)

DIRECTOR: LINDSAY ANDERSON
WRITER:    DAVID STOREY


I think this entry into my New Wave series is one of the most gritty, harsh, moving, honest, and realistic movies ever. It rocked me to my core. 

The relationship between Richard Harris's character and Rachel Roberts was unlike any other I've seen in movies. Richard Harris plays a working-class Northern Englishman who plays rugby soccer as a way to reach a certain strata in society he couldn't have working in a coal mine, his previous job. It seemed to me he sought the money he earned for playing football(British term for soccer) in order to take care of and impress Rachel Roberts's character, a single and widowed mother with two children whom he wants very much to love him. He boards a room in her modest house and tries to win her over by giving her children gifts and showing them attention, but the lady's closed off emotionally. 

Harris doesn't win her over, although they do eventually have sex together. Guilt then plagues her because they aren't married(among other reasons). The movie doesn't spell it out but she is a religious, puritanical woman who even calls herself dirty at one point for being with Harris and not married: a kept woman. They fight and argue. He slaps her in the face at one point while they stand outside a church. No happy ending for them. Not even a bittersweet one.

Like other British New Wave movies, in This Sporting Life the male character's ascent from the working class leads him into corruption and vice. The filmmakers's of these movies seem to be conveying through the medium that aspiration to the top of the ladder in society can only lead to unhappiness and disillusion.

I think Harris played caricatures of himself later in his career, I've seen a few later movies, but he's all tough and rough and jumpy here in what is probably his great screen performance.

Rachel Roberts gives what must be one of her finest screen performances as well. She disappears into her role. The scene between she and Harris sitting by the fireplace in the kitchen where she briefly smiles while reminiscing about her days working in a WWII bomb factory with her deceased husband is the most beautiful few seconds of screen acting I have ever seen. Roberts deserved that Oscar nomination and the Bafta award she won for Best British Actress. She lost the Oscar to Patricia Neal who won for for Hud.

BRITISH NEW WAVE: The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner (1962)

DIRECTED BY: TONY RICHARDSON
WRITTEN BY:  ALAN SILLITOE

I watched this British New Wave film last night thanks to my public library down the street. Tom Courtenay(so handsome) plays a working-class youth of northern England who ends up in a reform school for boys where he begins to run "long distance" to escape the oppression of growing up poor with no future really besides working at some grimy mill like his father who dies at the beginning of the film. Directed by Tony Richardson, who at the time was married to Vanessa Redgrave, it was adapted by Alan Sillitoe from his short story. Michael Redgrave, Vanessa's father, plays the stern head of the reform school. "Long Distance Runner" was one of several key movies of the New Wave in British cinema, which sought to portray the British working class with dignity. The press dubbed them "kitchen sink" dramas. These movies were also critical of the rigid British class system which existed at the time. Not sure if it still does.

The Honey Pot (1967)

This is a mess of a movie! One of several expensive bombs Rex Harrison made after My Fair Lady, The Honey Pot is an incoherent mess. This dud was produced, uncredited, by flamboyant Charles K. Feldman and directed by Joseph L. Mankiewicz.

I'm not sure what happened to the screenplay which Mankiewicz [All About Eve] adapted from a play by Frederick Knott [Dial M for Murder]. Rex Harrison is an eccentric millionaire in Venice who pretends he is dying inviting three former lovers so he can choose which one he wants to inherit his fortune. It's all I could decipher from the plot; the least I ask of a movie is that it makes sense. This one does not. Mackiewicz's last movie had been an incoherent overproduced expensive dud, Cleopatra, so his career wasn't exactly at its peak, and afterwards he turned to making documentaries; the Martin Luther King feature, King: A Filmed Record.. Montgomery to Memphis in 1970.

It's a shame given the caliber of the cast assembled. Besides Cliff Robertson, all give good performances in a bad movie. Rex Harrison is debonair and it's great fun watching him dance around like a ballerina. Susan Hayward is a hoot playing a spitfire character named Mrs. Lone Star Crockett Sheridan. Feldman's protege Capucine is by turns icy and droll playing a broke Princess. Edie Adams gives a bouncy, sly performance as a movie star; she looks like a synthesis of Stella Stevens and Jayne Mansfield, albeit a worn out one. According to IMDb, Anne Bancroft was originally cast in the part before, perhaps sensing disaster, dropping out.

Maggie Smith, as always, is superb. Giving a playful performance, she alone is worth watching this shit for.

The Honey Pot was cut before release in the U.S. by about 30 minutes so I'm not sure if that's why the movie is such an unmitigated disaster or not.

You can stream The Honey Pot courtesy of Hulu here.