William
Terrence “Billy” Fisher (played by Tom Courtenay): “Today's a day of big decisions —going to
start writing me novel—2000 words every day, going to start getting up in the
morning.”
[Looks at his
overgrown thumbnail]
Billy:
“I'll cut that for a start. Yes... today's a day of big decisions.”— Billy Liar (1963), screenplay by Keith
Waterhouse and Willis Hall, adapted from their play based on the novel by Waterhouse,
directed by John Schlesinger
This quote will make more than a few writers chuckle.
They will read in this not merely Billy’s daydream, but also the daily
temptation interfering with serious work. It separates, say, the professional
who struggles to translate his dreams into reality—say, F. Scott Fitzgerald—from
the millions who stops before getting started, such as Walter Mitty.
Speaking of the latter: Ben Stiller’s remake of the
fondly recalled 1947 adaptation of James Thurber’s The Secret Life of Walter Mitty will, I fear after watching a trailer, do to that film what Adam
Sandler did to Mr. Deeds Goes to Town:
violate the warm memories of a perfectly fine cinematic property.
As I dourly ruminated on that this past weekend, I
was reminded of another film about a man who escapes from dull reality through
daydreams in which he plays multiple roles: the 1963 British film Billy
Liar. It premiered in the
U.K. early in 1963, but was not released widely in the U.S. until this month a
half century ago.
The John Schlesinger film represents a watershed in cinema history. At first glance,
it seems merely another in the “angry young man” works that had come to
dominate Britain in the last half dozen years before its release: novels, plays and movies about
proletarian males stuck in lifeless jobs, with girlfriends who’ll tie them down
further, in a film medium that, like the characters’ lives, are without color. Even
Billy’s work environment—clerk in an undertaker’s office in Britain’s North
Country—is, literally, deadening.
But unlike these other works, Billy
Liar generates laughs about the lazy, irresponsible teenage who escapes
from hectoring parents, two fiancees
and a hectoring boss into the mythical land of Ambrosia. It
also has a shaft of real sunlight: a third girl, Liz, who offers love,
encouragement and hope—and, in the person of Julie Christie (seen here with
Courtenay), a transitional figure into a new age, even a new world.
In fact, I would argue that Ms. Christie, if not
perhaps the Fifth Beatle, certainly symbolized the liberated sense of fun and
possibilities of life that the Fab Four brought to their nation and the world. In
fact, there is a visual link between the two, as attested to by this article in the U.K.’s Coventry Telegraph marking the 50th
anniversary of the appearance of The Beatles at Coventry Theatre, where the group
met the up-and-coming actress backstage.
Christie was worried throughout the filming of Billy Liar that she was
making the worst possible impression onscreen. Just how irrational that fear
was can be gauged by her first appearance in the film.
Earlier, we’ve been told
that she is the type of “crazy” girl who “goes wherever she likes,” leaving one
job and town behind for another. Such dialogue becomes superfluous once
Christie starts walking down the high street of this drab town, humming a tune
and swinging her handbag. She skips over cracks in the paving stones as nimbly,
you suspect, as she will over obstacles in her way. A long way geographically
from mod London, she is, mentally, just around the corner from it.
Schlesinger shot this scene verite style, catching the startled looks of actual
members of a crowd, not actors, at the sight of the radiant actress. He
had translated onto celluloid the essence of a young woman who, in real life,
had learned habits of self-reliance and independence at English boarding
schools, camping on friends’ cots while attending drama school without a
scholarship, and protesting in Human Rights Day.
The crowd members in that seminal scene were falling
in love with Christie the way the audience would, in only 12 minutes all told onscreen. She was wordlessly but amply demonstrating why Al Pacino would later call her "the most poetic of all actresses."
As the quote above indicates, the day will indeed be one of "big decisions” for Billy, who throws away his chance to join Liz (and
realize his own TV writing ambitions) on her journey out of the town. The
audience didn’t make the same mistake. John Walsh’s perceptive article in the U.K.’s Independent
termed Christie “The Girl Who Showed the Way to the Future.” It’s an apt phrase for
one of the glories of Sixties British cinema.
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