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So much average

Memorable, crazy movie

Don't listen to the negative reviews

Great story, amazing characters, superb action, enthralling cinematography. Yes, this is something I am glad I spent money on.

Billy Liar was awful. It was uninteresting and about nothing.An annoying character making up silly fantasies in his head, no thanks. Turned it off, which is rare for me I will usually just endure it.

Although Tom Courtenay is the star of "Billy Liar" and gives an outstanding performance as this British version of a "Walter Mitty-like" character, it's a very young Julie Christie who steals the show. Her part isn't large and her on-screen time is limited, but Christie's free-spirited carefree role changes the dynamics of the film and challenges Courtenay's Billy Fisher to do something with his life besides living in a complex fantasy world of his own making. Fisher is mainly concerned with his standing in Ambrosia, a make-believe European country where he resides as military hero, dictator and all-around super human being. He's forever leading the parade in this imaginative world as his real life passes him by. In reality, Fisher lives in a drab northern English city and employed as an undertaker's assistant. He's a notorious and habitual liar and under-achieving in every facet of his existence---except one. He has more than one fiancée and is constantly juggling his lies to keep them at arm's distance. In the hands of a less capable director, Fisher's "problems" wouldn't elicit anything more than a yawn and a cheap laugh. But the great John Schlesinger is able to present Billy's story with a bundle of humor tinged with a whiff of sympathy. He's really a lost soul but doesn't know it yet. The ambivalent ending can be taken two different ways depending on the viewer's opinion. The final scene where Christie leaves alone on the train to London stays with you long after the final reel is over."Billy Liar" was Tom Courtenay's second major success after "The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner" was released the previous year. He followed this role with a lead part in David Lean's epic "Doctor Zhivago." He's kept himself busy with stage and screen work to this day and he's now "Sir" Thomas Courtenay. For Julie Christie, all the doors opened up for her after "Billy" and she continued on to international success. Her next film, also with Schlesinger directing, was "Darling" for which she took home the Academy Award for Best Actress. But seeing her in this first major role is certainly a treat. It's easy to see why she became one of screen's all-time leading ladies. Actress debuts don't come any better than Julie Christie's in "Billy Liar." John Schlesinger's career took off after "Billy Liar" and "Darling." He's probably best remembered now for directing Dustin Hoffmann and Lawrence Olivier in the thriller "Marathon Man."

For a long time, I've been curious about seeing this British comedy/drama starring Tom Courtenay and, in one of her earliest roles, Julie Christie since I read that a short-lived TV series starring Steve Guttenberg called "Billy" from the late '70s was loosely based on this. In this movie, directed by John Schlesinger, Courtenay is Billy Fisher who has an overactive imagination whenever things bother him which seems to be nearly all the time what with the demands he gets from his parents and grandmother, his doing unethical things at his undertaker job and getting caught, and his getting engaged to two very different women. There is, however, one other woman he likes and her name is Liz played by Ms. Christie in what seemed a big break for her especially considering how Schlesinger has her photographed in her initial scenes. And how she just oozes charm every time she talks! Anyway, there's plenty of hilarious scenes concerning Billy's dreams but also much sadness with the way things turn out as the film goes on. I probably need to see this again to really get all the scenes not to mention the fast-talking dialogue here especially with all the British terms sprinkled throughout. Still, I highly recommend Billy Liar especially those interested in the early career of one Julie Christie.

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.