By ‘eck, the young don’t know they’re born. Billy Liar is 50 this year but he’s been 19 forever. The original novel by Keith Waterhouse has been adapted into a perpetually performed play, a film, a TV series and a musical, not to mention numerous references in poems, songs and various other forms of pop culture. Why has the story endured so much? Well, it’s at once charmingly simple and emotionally complex, moralistic but cheeky, hilarious but bleak, and a character study that so comprehensively dissects not just one man’s near-psychopathy, but also the passive idlings of youth.
Bizarrely, the film reminds me a lot of Spring Breakers. Granted, there are marginally less tits and Franco in Billy Liar, but even half a century apart they’re both savage depictions of the reckless lengths the young will go in order to escape the mundanity of their lives and reach the idealised paradises sold to them wholesale by their cultural heroes. In Liar, Billy constantly casts off his lot as “just ordinary folk” by losing himself in dreams of being a war hero, a statesman, a man the elder generations might consider of worth. In Breakers, it’s the MTV-packaged dream of Spring Break Forever. In both films the young are pinned to their frustrating lives like an insect to a board, both flailing wildly to try and fly away.
Both films are also snapshots of their generations. Billy Liar was part of the new wave of kitchen sink dramas – a niche of naturalistic ‘just plain folk’ filmmaking that exploded in the 60s – which placed the action right in your nan’s front room. Established new wave director John Schlesinger confidently conjures scenes of working class Yorkshire, old buildings being torn down to make way for the new, Billy’s oblivious scampering towards self-destruction, and (especially when 60s starlet Julie Christie’s onscreen) the blossoming sexuality of the age found in dance halls and fumblings in the park – all of which signify the rise of a new generation, the kids who never fought a war, the progeny of the swaggering 60s, impatient and hungry. Billy works in an undertakers but, typical of the young, it’s not death he fears, but life.
And the life that awaits him as a local of Stradhoughton is depicted in a number of hilarious and bleak ways, whether it’s a hoard of mums celebrating the opening of a new supermarket with an expectant glee bordering on the cultish, or Billy’s nan, a rambling, ignored little life with nothing but a cosy chair to her name. The kitchen sink drama has always suffered from unfair accusations of being quaint, and life in Billy’s Yorkshire is indeed tame, but the film’s aware of that and it all serves as a haunting vision of what happens when dreams get smaller than the length of your street. In one gorgeous scene, Billy suffers a near breakdown in The Dance Hall, losing his mind amidst the trampling of a hundred local feet doing the congo, each one another bang on the pin that keeps him to the board.
Sir Tom Courtney’s Billy is a marvellous creation, possessing a slippery yet irresistible charm. The mischief in his eyes is infectious and he has the audience in the palm of his hand from the off, impressions and vocal character tics spilling out as thick and fast as each lie and fantasy that ping behind Billy’s eyes. In a beautiful moment, a rehearsed speech to an imaginary boss deforms into churchillian fervour and finally animalistic screeches as his imagination bends and twists from moment to moment. Crucially, it’s a performance that cracks but never softens as the film nears its resolution, and as the consequences of his deceptions start to pile up, he scampers backwards and forwards over the line between dreams and delusions, excuses and lies, boyhood japes and adult cruelty.
There will be those that cannot get past the This Is An Old Film feel, the deliberate pace and the working class anti-spectacle of the film’s setting and plot, but those that do will find Billy Liar to be a hilarious, charming and unsettling tale of wasted youth, one that feels as relevant and powerful as it did 50 long years ago. And as 25 year old manchild still clinging to his boyhood dreams, I speak with authority on this.
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