Remembering BILLY LIAR - Starring Tom Courtenay and Julie Christie

Tom Courtenay delivers a star-making turn as William Terrence Fisher ('Billy Liar') in one of the most memorable and universally acclaimed films of the 60s. Running from an unsympathetic working-class family, a pair of demanding fiancées and an insecure job at an undertakers, Billy escapes, Walter Mitty-like, into a world of fantasy where he can realize his dream ambitions. As work and family pressures build to new intolerable levels, Liz (an early, charismatic turn from Julie Christie), enters his drab life and offers Billy the one real chance he'll ever get to leave the past behind. Scripted by Keith Waterhouse from his own novel, and sensitively directed by John Schlesinger (Midnight Cowboy), Billy Liar is one of the few comedies of the British 'New Wave', marrying visual and verbal wit with a rather poignant rumination on the futility of dreams.
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[@joefairweatherblues8511]

What a terrific film! The cast were brilliant. "Fifty years ago," so this was recorded in 2013, Billy Liar being released in 1963. Instantly became a fan of Schlesinger after seeing this, and of Courtenay and Christie. Both were brilliant in Zhivago too.

[@PK-yf3hd]

I remember being aware of the filming happening at one point not far from where I lived in Leeds..Billy resonates especially with the northern breakaway boys of the time ,for whom London was their mythical ambition ..it wasn't a deep rooted aspiration but it was a very powerful temporary consuming drive..I managed to get to kings cross ,board the tube .look at the carriage adverts,decide (know)I couldn't survive and returned to kings cross, and slept on a bench until the first train north ..you needed to have talent,self belief,loose family ties, emotional resiliance and few scruples...I'm now 77yrs ,still in Leeds but fully resigned to the way it was and is

[@v1e1r1g1e1]

The Greatest Generation had heroes like the Desert Rats of Tobruk and the men who stormed the beaches of Normandy. Their children, sadly, were so many Billy Liars.

[@josephdigristina2808]

The first time I ever saw Julie Christie and it was love from then on.

[@frank1672]

Helen Frazer the new Julie Christie

[@hannible1002]

Where was Julie?

[@ipuzzled]

Courtenay mentions Dustin Hoffman's film "Quartet". A beautiful movie, funny and poignant, the only one Dustin Hoffman directed. The DVD extras showing a 70-year old Hoffman directing these great British actors with such vigor and heartfelt enthusiasm was also beautiful.

[@ipuzzled]

extras, that is, as in "special features", Hoffman also did a commentary track for "Quartet".