AboveDeepBuggy Some things I liked some I did not.

Seraherrera The movie is wonderful and true, an act of love in all its contradictions and complexity

Phillipa Strong acting helps the film overcome an uncertain premise and create characters that hold our attention absolutely.

Delight Yes, absolutely, there is fun to be had, as well as many, many things to go boom, all amid an atmospheric urban jungle.

SimonJack Having seen and enjoyed "The Secret Life of Walter Mitty," the 1947 movie that starred Danny Kaye, I was expecting to enjoy this 1963 British film. But I found nothing to compare favorably in "Billy Liar." Mitty's daydreams were escapist and recharging. Billy's fantasies were purging and led to lies, deceit and delusion.Mitty's daydreams were funny and had an uplifting sense. When he returned to reality, his spirits were lifted from his experience and he seemed genuinely to adjust better with all around him. But Liar's fantasies are outside the realm of daydreams. They begin with shattering or destroying everyone and everything about him that he doesn't like. Maybe one scene of himself as a soldier or gangster machine-gunning his family might evoke a laugh for its ridiculousness. But after that, the repeated entrances into his fantasies with violence to gain his "freedom" turn quickly to pathos.When he returns from each departure, Billy is not happy to be back. In subsequent scenes he seems to become more and more frustrated. His inability to deal with ordinary things from day to day seem to overwhelm him. He is a sick dude, completely self-centered and self-absorbed.Billy can't stand his life, yet is unable to make serious efforts to change it, and can't fit into it comfortably or sanely. He seems to be something of a sociopath. I just didn't see the humor in this – not in this script.I think there was potential for considerable comedy and humor in this story. But not as it is written and played. There might have been some very good laughs in Billy being engaged to two girls at the same time. But the scenes of his trying to get the engagement ring from one to the other are flat and humorless. Instead, we have two young girls who are hurt by his lie.I kept watching and waiting for this film to get better. At about two-thirds of the way through, it had become so disconnected and boring that I turned it off. I had lost interest even in seeing how it finally played out. From the reviews I've read, I see that it followed its moribund plot to the end.I give this film three stars just for the actors who showed up, especially the supporting cast. They did a decent job with a lousy script and a lousier plot. Even Tom Courtney couldn't raise this tiring script to mediocre. I enjoy British humor and wit as brought to the screen over the decades by Alistair Sim, Alec Guinness, John Cleese, Eric Blore, Leslie Howard, Terry-Thomas, Peter Sellers, Geoffrey Palmer, Michael Caine, Hugh Grant, Rupert Everett, Stephen Fry and others. But it's a real stretch to label this film a comedy. The best words to describe it would be a fantasy downer (or downer fantasy).Supposedly, novelist and playwright Keith Waterhouse wrote some of his youthful experiences into his stories. But one can surmise that Billy Liar's destiny belies that of Waterhouse, who created his character. Waterhouse lived to age 80 and had a very successful career as a novelist, columnist and playwright.

Bill Slocum In a world, Billy Fisher is a war hero, beloved despot, acclaimed novelist, writer of the reform-producing prison memoir "I Have Paid," and grandson of the woman who invented radium and penicillin (presumably not simultaneously).Unfortunately for Billy, this world exists only in his imagination. The rest of the time, he fights a losing battle with grim reality in the Yorkshire city where he lives, toiling as a mortician's clerk while dreaming of making a name for himself in London and lying whenever he feels threatened by reality, which is often.Tom Courtenay plays Billy as a mixture of dreamer and low-grade sociopath, drawing both our sympathy and scorn. Taken from an even bleaker comic novel by co-screenwriter Keith Waterhouse, "Billy Liar" is an enigma of a movie, directed by a man, John Schlesinger, who liked to make enigmatic films. Surrealistic yet gritty, "Billy Liar" throws a lot of comedic curves at the viewer, yet leaves you with heavier feelings."I turn over a new leaf every day, but the blots show through," is how Billy explains it to the one person who seems to understand, the radiant gadabout Liz (Julie Christie). Liz tells Billy he doesn't need to be stuck in his northern town; he can go to London like she does any time he wants. But of course it's not that simple, especially if you are a cheat and a coward at heart.The fantasy sequences are low-key but effective. We see Billy leading a parade where he also appears as various soldiers. A newspaper advertisement features an article about Billy with the headline: "Genius Or Madman?" When he's with one of the two young women he is presently engaged to, he imagines her slinking over to his bed in a negligee until his reverie is cut short when she catches his hand on her thigh.Schlesinger works the comedy more than the novel did, a good thing as "Billy Liar" needs a light touch. It is a rare film that marries the kitchen-sink drama of British films being made at the time with more farcical elements, but the drama is ever-present and gets more thick as the movie goes on. Even the humor has an unpleasant edge: One of the biggest laughs comes when we see Billy cut down his boss (Leonard Rossiter) with a tommy gun.Billy bickers constantly with his sullen father, while dismissing his mother rather heartlessly. "I'm not ordinary folk, even if she is," he says, after shaking off her attempt to talk some sense into him. Billy's just not that likable, even apart from his serial lying. The trick of the film is the way it gets you to pull for him anyway. We see how up against it he is, in the way Courtenay shrugs and smiles and drifts back into fantasy, losing precious time all the while."Billy Liar" could have been more fun and less dour, but that would have cut against its message of antic despair. You know what Billy should do with his life, and you know he knows it, too, but like Liz you see also how a dreamer's life can get in the way with reality, and understand why the future belongs to her, not him.

mark.waltz Tom Courtenay plays the title character, an artistic fellow who fantasizes about massacring everybody who gets on his nerves yet longs to escape his provincial community to head to London to follow his dreams. No, this is not a story of a 60's version of today's horrific events in schools and movie theatres and at political events. Billy is actually a gentle artistic man with just a bizarre imagination and his fantasy of blowing practically everybody away is simply his way of telling them to shut up. So bored with his routine existence, he wiles away the hours with enlightening fantasies that express the longing inside him. There's his babbity family-undertaker father Wilfred Pickles, washing obsessed mother Mona Washbourne and TV watching grandmother Ethel Griffies. Then, there are several cartoon-like love interests and his neighbors and other townsfolk who consider him a wastrel. In comes pretty Julie Christie, the only "normal" person he encounters, and definitely one that any heterosexual young man would abandon their family for.Sometimes aggravating and testy, this black comedy is none-the-less a well acted account of one man's desperation to find himself, and the adults who couldn't understand his feelings if he were to express them in a five-volume series of novels. Some of the cockney voices (particularly that of the shrill waitress he seems to be being forced into being engaged to) are ear shattering, but then there are the soothing voices of Courtenay, Washbourne (particularly memorable) and ultra beautiful Christie to balance it. The aged Griffies, a marvelous character actress from decades of stage and screen, is haunting as the not quite senile grandmother while Pickles (even if overly impatient with his son) is identifiable as the frustrated papa. The outstanding scene which ties everything together is a final one between Courtenay and Washbourne at the end where human emotions rise out of the stiff upper lip usually associated with the English.

Robert J. Maxwell When "Billy Liar" reached the screen in 1963 it was considered a little shocking, an innovative contribution to the British ashcan school of cinema, along with "Saturday Night and Sunday Morning", "Morgan", and a few others. The setting was always grimy and urban. The characters always working class. The conflicts were small and trivial to an outsider, and the treatment veered from comic to dramatic and back again, so that the audience was never quite certain about what was to come next or -- far more important -- how to feel about what they were watching. The characters were multi-dimensional, as characters are in life off the screen, and that's a compliment to the audience. People generally are not good or bad; they are good AND bad. Adults can make up their own minds about their responses, can't they? This is a good example of the genre. Tom Courtenay is Billy Fisher. He works in an undertaker's establishment in some minor role -- mailing out annual calendars and so forth. He's juggling two women as well. One blond bimbo satisfies his physical needs while the virginal brunette offers him a future in which, with any luck, the wedded couple will live in a shabby flat in the same smoky industrial city and raise a couple of children who will grow up to be as unexceptional as they themselves are. The brunette wanders happily through a cemetery visualizing what THEIR plot will look like. This legerdemain confuses Courtenay, who doesn't care about his job anyway, and he begins to get into some mostly amusing hot water at work.And so -- keeping two young women on the hook and in danger of being fired and not being particularly appreciated by his Mom and Dad at home -- Billy Fisher does what any sane person would do. He fantasizes. And we see clips of his fantasies unfold on screen.Probably this was the most original feature of the movie -- the fantasies. There were no shimmering dissolves, no harp arpeggios, to let us know they were coming. Dad insults Billy and -- WHAM -- a cut to Billy firing machine-gun bullets into Dad. None are particularly amusing -- this isn't Walter Mitty -- but they're all kind of shocking. Of course, that kind of editing has been imitated a thousand times since then and we've grown accustomed to it, but it was imaginatively done by director Schlesinger, a genuine innovation. More extended fantasies show us Courtenay as dictator of his own nation -- Ambrosia.Later in the film we get to know Julie Christie's character. She's a knockout, she sees through Billy's lies, and she wants to run away to London with him. At the last minute, when the couple are already seated on the train, Courtenay makes an excuse to leave for a moment and deliberately misses the train. The last we see of Julie Christie she is looking out the window of the departing coach in Courtenay's direction, her head cocked, smiling slightly, as if she'd expected him to abort the escape all along.It's sad, in the end, despite the comic interludes. This is a story in which the system embodies a lifelong inertia, and the system wins. Courtenay will wind up with some wife who is full of bourgeois impulses, but then he was never very creative himself -- except for his daydreams.