Very very predictable, including the post credit scene !!!

The greatest movie ever!

good back-story, and good acting

Best movie ever!

Billy Liar was awful. It was uninteresting and about nothing.An annoying character making up silly fantasies in his head, no thanks. Turned it off, which is rare for me I will usually just endure it.

Having seen Albert Finney on stage I didn't feel that Tom Courtney was as strong in the lead role for the film but in many ways this suits the part. No point in making the daydreaming loser too strong in personality, although the anomaly here is that he seems to have no difficulty attracting the ladies even if he is a bit soppy. Never as funny as the book, Schlesinger opens up the film and those facial gestures from the stage and subtle asides in the book are lost. As a movie capturing the times that were very much about to change it is brilliant. I loved the opening credits with the rows of semi-detached houses (because we are talking poor middle class here, not working class) and the shots of slum clearance. The tone is apt too and very theme, so central here, of 'going down to London' so much of the time just a few years before those swing sixties would burst everything apart. One last point, should anyone be wary of bothering with a British 'kitchen sink' drama, there is an early and completely incandescent performance from Julie Christie. She glows on screen and is particularly noticeable with the surrounding drabness and the usual stereotypical British girls on show. A sensational performance that set Christie up fora very decent career and parts in some very influential and important films, not least her next with the same director - Darling.

Tom Courtenay plays the title character, an artistic fellow who fantasizes about massacring everybody who gets on his nerves yet longs to escape his provincial community to head to London to follow his dreams. No, this is not a story of a 60's version of today's horrific events in schools and movie theatres and at political events. Billy is actually a gentle artistic man with just a bizarre imagination and his fantasy of blowing practically everybody away is simply his way of telling them to shut up. So bored with his routine existence, he wiles away the hours with enlightening fantasies that express the longing inside him. There's his babbity family-undertaker father Wilfred Pickles, washing obsessed mother Mona Washbourne and TV watching grandmother Ethel Griffies. Then, there are several cartoon-like love interests and his neighbors and other townsfolk who consider him a wastrel. In comes pretty Julie Christie, the only "normal" person he encounters, and definitely one that any heterosexual young man would abandon their family for.Sometimes aggravating and testy, this black comedy is none-the-less a well acted account of one man's desperation to find himself, and the adults who couldn't understand his feelings if he were to express them in a five-volume series of novels. Some of the cockney voices (particularly that of the shrill waitress he seems to be being forced into being engaged to) are ear shattering, but then there are the soothing voices of Courtenay, Washbourne (particularly memorable) and ultra beautiful Christie to balance it. The aged Griffies, a marvelous character actress from decades of stage and screen, is haunting as the not quite senile grandmother while Pickles (even if overly impatient with his son) is identifiable as the frustrated papa. The outstanding scene which ties everything together is a final one between Courtenay and Washbourne at the end where human emotions rise out of the stiff upper lip usually associated with the English.

Daydreaming Tom Courtenay (as William "Billy" Terrence Fisher) still lives with his parents, in a drab English town. Working class father Wilfred Pickles and housekeeping mother Mona Washbourne (as Geoffrey and Alice) worry about their son, as he seems to be going nowhere in life, and lives in a fantasy world of fabrications. A couple of locals have dubbed Mr. Courtenay "Billy Liar" due to his inability to put two truthful sentences together. Courtenay seems to be procrastinating his life away; he wants to be a writer, and certainly possesses a helpful imagination, but lacks motivation and focus.There are some universal themes in "Billy Liar" which must have been why it became such a 1960s favorite. Today, you have to watch it with patience. The film offers a more blatant, darker excursion into frustrated psyche than previously (notably, James Thurber's "Secret Life of Walter Mitty"). Herein, director John Schlesinger shows Courtenay, who imagines himself a military hero, slaughtering friends and relatives. On screen, these appear as flashes of thought. The symbolism works well; Courtenay works in a funeral parlor, where he's forgotten to send out some business calendars. Death and time.Mr. Schlesinger adapts the original Keith Waterhouse novel and play to film insightfully, with Denys Coop's black and white cinematography a great strength; their landscape parallels the protagonist's mind perfectly - sprawling, but desolate. Courtenay has dead-end relationships with virginal Helen Fraser (as Barbara) and brassy Gwendolyn Watts (as Rita). A ray of hope is provided by pretty Julie Christie (as Liz), in a lovingly placed role. Also impressive is Christie-contrasting grandmother Ethel Griffies (as Florence), who may be locked in the senility of her own imagination. Past and future. Life and death.******** Billy Liar (8/63) John Schlesinger ~ Tom Courtenay, Julie Christie, Mona Washbourne, Wilfred Pickles