The peculiar thing about Billy Liar is how everyone looks so old. They don’t, not really; it’s just the way a 26-year old Tom Courtenay, in a fantastic performance, somehow looks old before his time — I think it’s the tie — playing Billy Fisher, who is probably in his early 20′s. (My double-take is homologous to how, when I was in high school in the Philippines, our first-year English textbook’s provenance was clearly some cast-off American donation from the ’50s. How alien, the girls in their bobs and long skirts, and men (boys? those were boys?) in ties and crew cuts and dark-rimmed glasses looking like young Robert McNamaras, all looking as if they were college graduates awkwardly shoehorned into acting as high schoolers. How old. And yet they were my same age.)
In fact, Billy’s predicament seems utterly, freshly, contemporary, still a Walter Mitty for our times: an adult who hasn’t quite grown up yet, stuck in a dead-end job (here, taken almost literally, as he works in a funeral home). But he has big dreams of being an aspiring comedy writer and songsmith — dreams bigger than his cramped childhood home, certainly, but still dwarfed by his overbearing parents and his own touchingly believable immaturity.
Billy’s clearly something of a cad — juggling two fiancees (each one polar opposites in temperament), and they don’t even include Julie Christie! — but a likable, charming one. But despite the title, it’s not really his elaborate lying that’s the focus here, it’s his daydreams, fully cinematically realized. (Most memorable to me though were not his ludicrous fantasies about Ambrosia, but a hugely funny lunatic solo performance in his boss’s office that’s a superbly controlled precursor to everything, say, Jim Carrey, has ever done.)
It’s been many months since I was 26, many more than Billy’s unposted calendars — you know, those ones that he tries in vain to flush down the toilet, all those years and months backing up the plumbing. And one can’t help feeling a little nostalgic — not for the bleak northern England of the ’60s, which I can’t share, but for that state of fecklessness, which Schlesinger captures so precisely in Billy Liar. And then he grows up.
And oh, Julie Christie, the rumors were true: one of the great movie entrances of all time, a goddess among mere mortal pedestrians, her handbag describing little arcs, the literal embodiment of Swinging London. Buildings collapsing in her wake.
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