Film Forum

U.K., 1963
Directed by John Schlesinger
Screenplay by Keith Waterhouse and Willis Hall
Based on Waterhouse & Hall’s play and Waterhouse’s novel
Starring Tom Courtenay, Julie Christie, Mona Washbourne, Finlay Currie, Leonard Rossiter
Approx 98. min.

Courtenay’s Billy Fisher is a feckless aspiring comedy writer with a rich fantasy life that takes him away from his dreary Yorkshire town, endlessly nagging family, a pompous boss (played by Kubrick fave Leonard Rossiter), and two fiancées. Then Mod, Mod Julie Christie beckons him to London…

Alternately hilarious and mortifying, one of the finest—certainly the funniest—movies to come out of the 1960s Brit New Wave explosion. Based on Keith Waterhouse’s novel and the hit West End play by Waterhouse and Willis Hall (with Courtenay and Albert Finney alternating the title role), the movie adaptation would spawn a popular TV series, a sequel to the novel (Billy Liar on the Moon), and a successful stage musical, while cementing the careers of both Courtenay (“probably the best of Britain’s New Wave of actors” – Variety) and Schlesinger, with Christie’s dazzling turn spring-boarding her to superstardom. Named one of the 100 Greatest British Films of All Time in a BFI poll, rating higher than Schlesinger’s Oscar®-winning DARLING and Richard Lester’s A HARD DAY’S NIGHT.

Presented with support from The Ada Katz Fund for Literature in Film

 A RIALTO PICTURES RELEASE

Trailer

Reviews

“One of the great movies of the 1960s… In spite of its bitter edge, BILLY LIAR is pure Ambrosia.”
– A.O. Scott, The New York Times

“COURTENAY’S GREATEST PERFORMANCE… He balances testiness and frustration, levity and rage, and never soft-pedals his character’s more unsympathetic tendencies.”
–  Ryan Gilbey, New Statesman

“Quick-fire satire... Funny and unexpectedly poignant.”
– Dave Calhoun, Time Out (London)

“Christie’s entrance is one of the most beguiling things in ’60s cinema: a long fugue in which wanders gaily through the streets of a Northern town, swinging a large handbag. The sequence owes something to the nouvelle vague, and as that was a liberating movement, so is she a liberating spirit.”
– David Shipman, The Great Movie Stars