In an interview with Tom Courtenay, included on this 50th anniversary release of Billy Liar, the film’s star admits to being unconvinced about the merits of the fantasy sequences for which the film is so distinctive. Having played the role of William Fisher on stage, first as understudy to Albert Finney, he found their inclusion in the film – though they are “the scope more of the cinema” – less appealing than the domestic scenes, and struggled with them.
It’s one of many interesting reflections in the disc’s brief extras. In another, Saint Etienne’s Bob Stanley celebrates the fantasies as rooting the film in comedy. Without it, he says, it’s a film about a bloke who cheats on his girlfriends, and he’s not a very nice character.
True enough , and it may have been interesting to see the contributors discussing the film rather than interviewed separately. It’s likely that if you side with Courtenay, still a welcome if occasional presence on our screens, the film will hold significantly less appeal.
There are few scenes without Fisher, one of the British New Wave’s most memorable – and tiresome – characters, and the film could be a very irritating watch if it were not for Courtenay, whose ease and obvious pleasure in moving between pastiche, frivolity and – occasionally – sincerity provides its primary appeal.
Fisher uses daydreams to escape; bored by his job, feeling undervalued by his family, he imagines fragments of a new life as various heroes in imagined nation Ambrosia before being snapped out of his reveries. As suggested, the film leans more towards humour than contemporary kitchen-sink classics such as Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, and it’s less obviously angry. But there are plenty of echoes in the domestic scenes, particularly between Billy and his father. Like his protagonist, director John Schlesinger uses comedy as a diversion tactic.
Also included is a run through some papers of Keith Waterhouse, who adapted the film from his novel and stage play. After his death in 2009 his family donated them to the British Library, whose curator Zoe Wilcox traces the germ of ideas for the film in early manuscripts Three Straws to a Cup of Coffee and How to Live to Be 22.
Another extra involves director Richard Ayoade, who, like Stanley, singles out the film’s best scene for attention. With Billy’s mother in hospital shortly after the death of his grandmother, he tries to comfort her hurriedly, having agreed to move to London with Julie Christie’s Liz (one of the few characters he doesn’t daydream about machine-gunning).
At this point he’s allowing reality to take precedence over fantasy; taking a risk rather than stay trapped in a comfortable monotony, and escaping by forging a new life rather than imagining one. The scene ends with him striding out of the hospital as he goes to catch the train, seemingly carefree. Immediately before, the camera lingers, just long enough, on his mother’s face.
‘Billy Liar: 50th Anniversary Edition’ is released on DVD and Blu-Ray on 6 May