Film Review: A Study on "Billy Liar"(1963) - [Essay #5 - April 2021]

 

Unraveling the Porkies!: A Study on "Billy Liar"

*Super Spoilers*

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"Today is the day for big decisions."  - Willian "Billy" Fisher

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Table of Contents:

1. Summary

2.     Production History

3.     Dialogue

4. Art Direction

5. Cinematography

6. Editing

7. Conclusion

*Reading time approx: 15 minutes

*Published April 24, 2021

*Watch the Film

*Listen the Essay

*Featured on IMDB

*Written by Bolivar T. Caceres    

*Edited by Mike Gates        

   

"One can say that Billy Fisher is Walter Mitty and that Keith Waterhouse’s 1959 novel, Billy Liar, sprang from James Thurber’s pages. "

            The road to success can be daunting. Broken-down support systems and people's blind cheering can make it hard to share failures. Therefore, white lies  turn black, tarnishing a once-promising path and person. In John Schlesinger’s Billy Liar (1963), Billy Fisher (Tom Courtenay) faces an identity crisis when he covers his compounded lies of being an engaged, rising comedy writer with more lies, unable to live the truth. His fears of losing his affected self-image are constantly questioned, always offering him the opportunity to finally be real and begging him to tell no more porkies. Please, Billy, don't tell porkies. Billy, please.

 

 

Summary:

"Good morning, housewives," a Yorkshire radio host opens up his segment with birthday wishes, shout-outs, and cheery suburban music dedications. In one of the many working-class apartments that listen to Housewives' Choice, a tender-hearted Alice Fisher (Mona Washbourne), Billy's mother, waits hopefully for her son's dedication like she waits for him to mature, both of which seem like impossibilities with every second.

Billy lacks commitment. Still living at home with his parents and grandmother, he shows no urgency. Billy is thirty minutes late to work as an undertakers' clerk. He daydreams of Ambrosia, his war-winning country; he is the leader, a soldier in every regiment, and one of the people. He is beloved by Ambrosia, "Viva Fisher." 

-- But in reality, his novel remains unwritten. His grossly long thumbnail is uncut, and he may never trim it. Two women wholeheartedly believe they are to marry Billy; one wears the engagement ring that the other soon learns is not at the jewelry shop. A best friend's mother is certain Billy has a sister and a hospitalized father. And those closest to Billy stops listening to the shepherd boy's cries. 

The boy stuck behind the expectations of a man of success: a steady job, a wife, kids, and one's own home. The pressure of expectations is the cause for his lie that the famous comedian Danny Boon has shown interest in his non-existent work. However, the tragedy is that the only fool that falls for Billy's lies is himself. Lies he must face when his grandmother is ill, he has no engagements, he loses his job for shirking his duties, and when the globetrotting Liz (Julie Christie) gives him the chance to live his dreams in London. But when the time comes, Billy commits to milk and staying in Yorkshire instead of London.

 

 

Production History:

One can say that Billy Fisher is Walter Mitty and that Keith Waterhouse’s 1959 novel, Billy Liar, sprang from James Thurber’s pages. Both Fisher and Mitty wish to escape their comfy lives with irritable but yet not all out unsolvable problems. However, they fail to act beyond their daydreams, dreaming of themselves in positions of power: officers, doctors, political leaders. They ultimately suffer to make an honest connection with their environment and the people within it. 

This is not the case for Waterhouse’s novel. The narrative told in any media format is successful. Albert Finney stars in West End Theatre’s 1963 stage adaption with Tom Courtenay as his understudy. And without hesitation Waterhouse and Willis Hall script Billy Liar for the silver screen, choosing British New Wave auteur, John Schlesinger, to direct. Yet, it is Courtenay that Schelesinger chooses to play Billy Liar, for Courtenay's passive and balanced portrayal of the wayward character. 

Schlesinger’s Billy Liar is the culmination of the ideas and practices of the British New Wave and Cinema Verite: the gritty, realistic accounts of New England’s working class. But, unlike its characters’ inability to leave footprints in the sand, Billy Lair has no issues defining its place in film history. 

Dialogue:

Billy Liar's rapid-fire dialogue, evocative of late 1930s and early 1940s Hollywood comedies, is heavy with North British colloquialism and euphemism. However, behind the film's use of satire and British culture, there is a harshness. Every moment away from Ambrosia, speaking & dealing with real people, reminds Billy of his faults and lies. "You rotten, lying, crossed-eyed git. You're nothing else." Rita (Gwendolyn Watts), one of his fiancées, rebukes him. 

During breakfast, Billy's father, Geoffery Fisher (Wilfred Pickles), scoffs at Billy's big London employment, "Scriptwriting? He can't write his own bloody name so that anybody could read it." Even his mother, trying to see the best in her son, reminds him in private, "If you're in any more trouble, Billy, it's not something you can leave behind you, you know. You put it in your suitcase, and you take it with you." 

The dialogistic bombardment and social pressures force Billy inside himself, conjuring the fictitious sovereignty and power, a place of success and support. He is unable to define himself and his actions and fails to meet his and others' expectations. -- And all of these forces Billy to question his self-worth and identity. It compels him to lie. However, working-class cultures often believe that tough love can have a positive effect, even if slow. The train leaves, and Billy returns home to unpacks his troubles. 

 Art Direction:

For Billy Fisher's non-fictitious moments, Art Director Ray Simm and his team use what is around them, accessible locations in Yorkshire, places the working class of Britain haunts and commune. -- And what is in the closet, clothing and props worn and used by the working class, often the appearance of style.

Billy walks into the house for lunch dressed like a proper schoolboy -- blazer, jumper, and button up shirt -- and he assumes one, too. Filming on location, using available resources, non-professional actors, and any low-budget means to design a film are principles of Italian Neorealism and the French New Wave. 

However, when Billy is in Ambrosia, Simm reverses the design approaches. The studio's ostentatious style is prevalent in these fantastical scenes, as if Schlesinger said, "Go all out!" Billy is in his military regalia; the Ambrosians are in their military uniforms with their accouterments. There are large banners and propaganda for the leader of Ambrosia, Billy Fisher. Tanks embellish the parade. In another fantasy, when Billy finishes his book, "I have paid," while in prison for stealing his job's calendar, promising the warden reformation, the prison is a mansion with an enormous mechanical gate. The paparazzis' cameras are frantic at their new celebrity. 

Yes, Billy Liar tells of the dubiety faced by the youth of the working class, expectations of marriage and stability crushing self-expression, causing a person that wants to be part of society as themselves to snap. -- But too, Billy Liar is the story of the new wave of auteurs' desire to be part of the film culture while producing their work their way. It so happened their way was to break from tradition.

 

Cinematography: 

Liz jumps off the lorry, returning home, to her city, from her trip. Billy marvels at her. "Where's she been this time then?" Arthur (Rodney Bewes) asks. "I don't know. She goes where she feels like," Billy replies, enamored at the adventures he believes Liz partakes in, adventures that are only dreams for him. 

The virtuoso Danys Coop marks Liz's return with handheld street cinematography. A medium shot follows her walking through Yorkshire greeting old faces. It is the same shot used moments before when Arthur and Billy foolishly galavant their way through town. The documentary-style cinematography tinged with cinema verite practices defines the visual language for all non-fantastical scenes, an unstylized visual language that even the globetrotting celebrity must follow. Unlike Billy, she cannot acquiesce to any confinements, always taking the train to wherever she can go. 

Billy's outlandish fantasies are how he copes. Walking by a soccer stadium, he hears the crowd roar exuberantly, and his mind goes to Ambrosia. The stadium crowd is Ambrosian listening to their ruler's bombastic rhetoric. Coops trade the shaky handle held medium shots for static over the shoulder and low-angle shots. The handheld pan of the crowd becomes static. Billy's dreams are cleaner, professional, and even more stylized. 

Part documentary, part studio, all a culmination of British New Wave Ideals, Coop's black and white cinemascope cinematography is the demarcation between reality and fantasy while helping to illustrate the dilemmas of a working-class dreamer.  

 

 

Editing:

During breakfast, Billy's family nags him to dress for work, stop being lazy, take life seriously, and with a jump cut, Billy is an Ambrosian Militant in the same dining room sent by the Ambrosia ruler to slaughter them silent with an automatic machine gun. Later, his persistent fiance, Rita, inquiring of her ring's whereabouts, pesters Billy, and again, Billy is the Ambrosian Militant with a jump cut. 

Roger Cherrill's skillful use of the jumpcut bridges Billy's daydreams and his real-life, jumping the audience quickly between both. Cherrill captures the experimental and free-natured editing of Dziga Vertov's A Man with A Movie Camera (1929) in the Yorkshire scenes. In the Ambrosian scenes, Cherrill evokes American Hollywood editing structures, such as those implemented by auteurs like Preston Sturgese. 

Cherill's editing blends film history to place Billy Liar as a prime example of the narrative innovations to become predominant in contemporary visual storytelling. Furthermore, with keen attention to the pre-production blueprint and the production teams' work, Cheerill keeps an otherwise schizophrenic narrative well-paced and digestible.

Conclusion:

Fantasies to be a great writer, a celebrity, a world-travel, a ruler can be easier than facing the courses to materialize them into reality. A nine-to-five job, marriage, and a familiar routine seem far from the illusion of profound success. There is little excitement with the idea of stability and leaving behind high school tomfoolery. Still, humans want to achieve their fantasies, to leave one's mark on human history.

Schlesinger and his team reinstate this dilemma repeatedly to build a character, and therefore a visual language, which is evocative of the modern human's struggles on their journey of self-discovery, often using lies as security. However, whether Billy Fisher remains a liar or not, or even why he lies to boot, is irrelevant; in the end, Billy finally accepts himself and his place in the world. His mother's advice echoes through the train station: "If you're in any more trouble, Billy, it's not something you can leave behind you, you know. You put it in your suitcase, and you take it with you." Billy will unpack his suitcases and face his problems.

Bolivar T. Caceres is a Bronx-based artist and writer. His poems appear on ShortEdition and Ariel Chart. He is also the author of the chapbook Outside My Garret Window, published in 2020. He currently writes for the quarterly film blog Film Studies Quarterly and the news blog New York Positivity. Connect with him on social media @BolivarTCaceres and at www.BtcArt.co.

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