Old Yorker

John Schlesinger (1963)

John Schlesinger’s first feature film, A Kind of Loving, appeared in 1962.  Billy Liar, his second, followed a year later.  Both are adaptations of novels with a contemporary northern setting, written by Yorkshiremen who were about thirty at the time of publication.  Both novels became stage plays too – Billy Liar before it was a film, A Kind of Loving after.  The protagonist in each case is a young man oppressed by the constraints of the world he inhabits.  But whereas Stan Barstow’s A Kind of Loving is straight kitchen-sink drama, Keith Waterhouse’s Billy Liar has an important element of fantasy.  Inside his head, Billy Fisher temporarily escapes, from nagging parents and girlfriends and his deadly dull office job with a firm of undertakers, by imagining himself supremo of the make-believe country of Ambrosia.  (On a less visionary level, Billy also makes up stories about his family and love life, hence his sobriquet.)  By the time that Schlesinger made Billy Liar, the characteristic gritty urban landscape of ‘British New Wave’ cinema was already familiar, thanks to films like Jack Clayton’s Room at the Top (1959), Karel Reisz’s Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1960) and Tony Richardson’s A Taste of Honey (1961), as well as Schlesinger’s own debut feature.  Billy Liar’s mix of social realism and fantasy makes it distinctive within the genre.  In Schlesinger’s hands, the mix is awkward and often unpleasant too.

Billy Liar, with a screenplay by Keith Waterhouse and Willis Hall, supplies early evidence of what became Schlesinger’s persisting tendencies as a film-maker.  When sympathetic towards characters, he was a skilled and sensitive director of actors.  When he went in for larger social commentary, at least in stories set in or near the present day (Far from the Madding Crowd (1967) is a signal exception), he was shallowly misanthropic.  Midnight Cowboy (1969) is the most flagrant example.  The central relationship between Jon Voight’s Joe Buck and Dustin Hoffman’s Ratso Rizzo is moving and memorable:  Schlesinger gets excellent performances from both his lead actors.  Yet his critique of American values and culture is indiscriminately hostile.  Nearly everyone else, including people just as much on the receiving end of America as Joe and Ratso, is treated with derision  The result is compelling but hardly makes sense.  In Billy Liar, Schlesinger is much more favourably disposed to Billy (Tom Courtenay) and one of his girlfriends, Liz (Julie Christie), than to anyone else.  In long retrospect, this film often looks like a lower-key warm-up for the cynical pyrotechnics of Midnight Cowboy.

Billy Liar opens with the actual signature music to the long-running radio programme Housewives’ Choice and a cameo from Godfrey Winn, as himself, compering the show on the BBC Light Programme, as Winn often really did in the early post-war decades.  Schlesinger cross-cuts between Winn in the studio and shots of anonymous urban and suburban housing.  When Winn says, ‘The next record was requested by …’ and gives a name and address, the camera records excitement in the requestee’s neighbourhood, as women emerge from their houses to tell each other the news.  The sequence seems to be poking fun at both Winn’s suavely condescending manner and his listeners’ excitement.  It’s inoffensive enough but Schlesinger, once he opens the Fishers’ front door, switches to a harsher tone that’s a sour taste of things to come.  Billy, who’s already late for work, hasn’t yet appeared for breakfast.  His parents (Mona Washbourne and Wilfred Pickles) squabble about whose fault it is he’s still in bed and who should get him out of it.  His grandmother (Ethel Griffies) chips in occasionally.

Schlesinger cuts to Billy upstairs, recumbent and dreaming Ambrosian daydreams.  When he eventually comes down, his elders’ grumbling continues until he imagines opening fire on them with a machine gun.  This fantasy fusillade recurs several times in the course of the film – it’s a serviceable comic device (and the best part of the imaginary elements, not least because it’s always brief).  What’s striking is that the pitch of his family’s carping doesn’t change, regardless of whether or not Billy is there to hear it.  His exasperation at the barrage of moans and John Schlesinger’s scornful treatment of the moaners are indistinguishable.  In the outside world too, there’s a good supply of people continually going on at Billy – Mr Shadrack (Leonard Rossiter), his martinet boss at the ‘funeral furnishings’ office, and blowsy Rita (Gwendolyn Watts), one of the two girls to whom Billy has (so far) proposed and who are sharing a single engagement ring.  Rita’s polar-opposite number Barbara (Helen Fraser) oppresses him in a different way – soppy-nice and primly respectable, she’s alarmingly eager to settle down to three-piece-suite married life.  Shadrack, Rita and Barbara are all caricatures but there’s no cartoon light-heartedness in them.  The actors are on top of their roles in short order and Schlesinger doesn’t want them to show different sides.  It’s the repetitive playing as much as the persistent complaints that ensures this trio get on the viewer’s nerves as they do Billy’s.

As Mrs Rothwell, the hero’s mother-in-law and nemesis in A Kind of Loving, Thora Hird was relentless too but her character had dramatic weight.  The supporting roles in Billy Liar don’t but Schlesinger directs the actors in them as if they did.  With at the most three exceptions (see below), the people in Billy’s world aren’t rich or powerful so it’s discomfiting that Schlesinger is intent on ridiculing their concerns and aspirations – and rather puzzling, in view of the film’s social realism aspect.  Here too, Schlesinger hasn’t got A Kind of Loving out of his system.  Like its predecessor, Billy Liar has black-and-white photography by Denys Coop.  The scene-setting at the start includes some quasi-documentary footage, including a wrecking ball demolishing houses.   This shot has the virtue of ambiguity – is the old, obsolete order being swept away or are cultural traditions being destroyed? – but that’s a virtue lacking in Schlesinger’s small-minded demolition job on people.

The cheesy comedian Danny Boon (Leslie Randall) – Billy has dreams of writing material for him – is an outsider in two ways:  he’s a TV celebrity and on a flying visit to the town to open a new supermarket[1].  The other two relatively affluent figures are the partners in Shadrack and Duxbury, the firm of undertakers.  Next to figure-of-fun Shadrack, Councillor Duxbury (Finlay Currie) is almost complex.  This elderly pillar of the community speaks in a local accent both broad and, to Billy, comically old-fashioned.  Duxbury is aware that Billy imitates him for a laugh and, when he lets Billy know as much, is touching and dignified.  The script and Schlesinger are comparatively generous to a character who’s already being made fun of by another character.  It’s a pity that Finlay Currie’s Scottish vowels coming through the Yorkshire ones makes Duxbury’s voice even more bizarre than was presumably intended.

The direction is consistently overemphatic.  When Julie Christie’s Liz appears, it’s instantly clear that she’s different from the other girls Billy knows – a glamorous free spirit.  As the camera follows Liz down the street, Schlesinger has to underline the point by having her do little skips, swing her handbag, make faces in shop windows.  The Ambrosia sequences, typically featuring massed ranks of marching extras, are literal-minded and reliably unfunny.  When Billy and Liz talk together at a dance hall and he describes his world of make-believe, Tom Courtenay’s animation is delightful.  It also confirms the tiresome redundancy of the staged, set-piece fantasies.  However, there’s a serious weakness in the climax to Billy Liar – whether it derives from the novel and/or stage play, I don’t know – that can’t be laid at Schlesinger’s door.

Billy proposes marriage to Liz, who accepts.  He accepts her proposal to leave town immediately:  they agree to catch the midnight train to London.   (Liz, we gather, is already an experienced traveller.)  When he returns home to pack a suitcase, Billy learns that his grandmother, who had a funny turn earlier in the day, is now seriously ill in hospital.  After a row with his father, Billy goes to join his mother’s hospital vigil.  His grandmother dies soon after he arrives but Billy still heads off to the railway station to meet Liz.  It becomes obvious during the few minutes before their train is due to leave that he’s losing his nerve about going to London.  He makes an excuse to get off the train to buy milk from a machine on the station.  He does so in time to get back on board but hesitates long enough to ensure the train leaves without him.  He then pretends to curse having missed it.  Liz looks back at Billy with a rueful smile.  She knew he wouldn’t go through with it:  she’s even put his suitcase out on the platform for him.  It’s understandable that Keith Waterhouse and Willis Hall felt the need for a family crisis to bulk up the finale but the unexpected death of a member of the household is too major.  We seem meant to see Billy’s failure to leave home as final proof that he’s all talk:  his falsehoods including lying to himself that he’d do anything to escape his humdrum life.  But his decision not to walk out on this particular night is not only reasonable but responsible.

In the opening scene at the Fishers’ home, Billy’s mother laments that the record request she’s sent to Housewives’ Choice seems to be at the bottom of Godfrey Winn’s pile.  She gave the letter to Billy to post:  it emerges that he failed to do so not out of carelessness but because he read it first and was ashamed of his mother’s poor grammar.   When, with some embarrassment, he admits this to her, Mrs Fisher’s hurt registers quietly but unmistakably.  Mona Washbourne is a fine actress:  more than anyone else in the supporting cast, she tries to give her character shadings.  The upside of the misjudged subplot around the grandmother’s death is the clear opportunity it gives Washbourne, in the hospital sequences, to enrich her portrait of Billy’s mother.   As the father who’s grafted his way up to running his own small business and is infuriated by his daydreaming, grammar school-educated son, Wilfred Pickles is relatively one-note (and one volume, which is mostly too loud) – though you always feel, especially in the last showdown with Billy, that he could have done a lot more with more sensitive direction.  In the smaller parts, it may seem surprising that an actor as limited as Rodney Bewes, playing Billy’s pal and work colleague Arthur, does best.  This is, I think, because Schlesinger’s attitude towards Arthur is unusually benign.

Although it’s easy with hindsight to say that Tom Courtenay and Julie Christie stand out, it’s no less hard to ignore what’s staring you in the face.  Courtenay had followed Albert Finney in playing Billy on stage.  While anyone who loves watching a great screen actor will naturally regret that Finney didn’t do the film, Courtenay’s boyishness and lighter presence make Billy Liar more easily entertaining than it might have been with the more imposing Finney in the role (especially given Schlesinger’s direction).  It’s hard to pin down Tom Courtenay’s particular quality here:  describing him as ‘spiritual’ is OTT, though the French spirituel, with its hints of wit and mischief, is less wide of the mark.   The tangled-web momentum of Billy’s untruths allows Courtenay to show off his versatility and comic invention, and he’s immensely likeable.  Julie Christie hardly compares in terms of acting ability but her radiant warmth and beauty, particularly in the unlovely settings of Billy Liar, are glorious.  It’s hardly surprising she went on to bigger things so fast.  Two years later, she was starring in Doctor Zhivago and winning a Best Actress Oscar for Darling – John Schlesinger’s next film.

1 September 2018

[1]  The setting of Waterhouse’s novel is the fictional town of Stradhoughton in Yorkshire.  Unless I missed it, there’s no mention of the town’s name in the film, which was shot largely in Bradford.