Tom Courtenay and Julie Christie get close in BILLY LIAR
BILLY LIAR (John Schlesinger, 1963)
BAMcinématek, BAM Rose Cinemas
30 Lafayette Ave. between Ashland Pl. & St. Felix St.
Sunday, June 7, 4:00 & 8:45
Series runs May 29 – June 16
718-636-4100
www.bam.org
Based on the novel by Keith Waterhouse (which he also adapted into a play with Willis Hall and which later became a musical), John Schlesinger’s Billy Liar is a prime example of the British New Wave of the 1950s and 1960s, which features work by such directors as Lindsay Anderson, Joseph Losey, Ken Russell, Nicolas Roeg, and Karel Reisz. Tom Courtenay stars as William Fisher, a ne’er-do-well ladies’ man who drudges away in a funeral home and dates (and lies to) multiple women, all the while daydreaming of being the president of the fictional country of Ambrosia. Billy lives in his own fantasy world where he can suddenly fire machine guns at people who bother him and be cheered by adoring crowds as he leads a marching band. Reminiscent of the 1947 American comedy The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, in which Danny Kaye dreams of other lives to lift him out of the doldrums, Billy Liar is also rooted in the reality of post-WWII England, represented by Billy’s father (Wilfred Pickles), who thinks his son is a no-good lazy bum. Shot in black-and-white by Denys Coop (This Sporting Life, Bunny Lake Is Missing), the film glows every time Julie Christie appears playing Liz, a modern woman who takes a rather fond liking to Billy. The film made Christie a star; Schlesinger next cast her in Darling, for which she won the Oscar for Best Actress. Billy Liar is screening on June 7 in the BAMcinématek series “Black & White ’Scope: International Cinema,” an eighteen-day, twenty-eight-film festival featuring 1950s and ’60s black-and-white films shot in CinemaScope. The series includes such other fab works as Andrzej Wajda’s Siberian Lady Macbeth, Frantisek Vlacil’s Valley of the Bees, Kaneto Shindo’s Onibaba, Jack Clayton’s The Innocents, and Masaki Kobayashi’s Samurai Rebellion.