Billy Liar (Penguin Decades)

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A brilliant novel, in language fresh and sweet, with characters vivid and singular in an inventive and dynamic story. It teems, it bursts with originality.’ - Saturday Review The title of the song " Twisterella" is also the title of a song that Billy co-writes in the novel. At the dawn of the 1960s, Britain was still generally a repressed, conformist world, and this world is even more stifling and claustrophobic in the small fictional town of Stradhoughton in Yorkshire (somewhere to the north of Leeds).

Billy Liar: my most overrated film | Most overrated films Billy Liar: my most overrated film | Most overrated films

I wished I’d written Keith Waterhouse’s first novel; and now, even more, I wish I’d written his second . . . Billy Liar is very funny: funny in a wild and sardonic and high-spirited way without malice or cruelty.’ - John Braine, author of Room at the Top As Billy's web of falsehoods begins to unravel, and more lies are required to fill the gaping holes in his chronicle, the more hilarious the novel becomes. The classic comedy of a 50s youth trapped inside a Walter Mitty fantasy-world, published as a Penguin Essential for the first time. Keenan, John (11 August 2009). "Fifty years on, Billy Liar has not grown old". The Guardian . Retrieved 4 November 2021.Billy also finds himself attracted to his former girlfriend Liz ( Julie Christie), who has just returned to town from Doncaster. Liz is a free spirit who, unlike anyone else in town, understands and accepts Billy's imagination. However, she has more courage and confidence than Billy, as shown by her willingness to leave her home town and enjoy new and different experiences. Under pressure, Billy ends up making dates with both Barbara and Rita to meet each one on the same night at the same local ballroom. There, the two girls discover the double engagement and begin fighting with each other. All of Billy's lies seem to catch up with him as it's announced publicly that he is moving to London to work with Danny Boon, and Billy's friend scolds him for lying to his mother. The film belongs to the British New Wave, inspired by both the earlier kitchen sink realism movement and the French New Wave. Characteristic of the style is a documentary/ cinéma vérité feel and the use of real locations (in this case, many in the city of Bradford in Yorkshire [5]). But you can’t hate him, because running through Billy is a streak of melancholia as wide as the River Thames. He knows he’s trapped in this small stifling town where nobody is on his wavelength. Not that you’d especially want to be on his wavelength. But still, we know that feeling. So underneath the mostly unfunny comedy is a sad familiar tale plus a whole ton of accurate detail about English provincial life in 1959, after Elvis but before the Beatles, and before the contraceptive pill too. For all his personality issues, Billy is likeable (if endlessly frustrating) and very realistic; indeed, I found some disturbing echoes of my own youth when reading the novel. Waterhouse is also impeccable in his astute rendering of both the local characters and dialect, and the difficult social transition that regional England was going through at the time. There are some great comedy lines too – I have no doubt the Monty Python team took inspiration from this novel for some of their sketches, especially the Four Yorkshiremen sketch October, 1962: The film opens with soldiers marching in a parade led by a brass band. The parade passes in front of Leeds Town Hall. A few tanks bring up the end of the parade, and actors dressed as dignitaries are standing on the steps of Town Hall watching the procession pass by. Various crew and film equipment can be seen, and director John Schlesinger uses a blow horn to give instructions to the surrounding extras. He also instructs the actors on the steps of the City Hall. Further crewmembers set up a camera on a tripod outside the Town Hall to capture the scene from a different angle.

Billy Liar - Penguin Books UK

This distinguishes Billy Liar from another contemporary coming-of-age novel, The Catcher in the Rye. The latter is a frame story in which Holden Caulfield starts the novel in an institution (jail? Mental health facility?) from which he’s due to be discharged, and he reflects on events since the previous Christmas. But while Billy and Holden are each confronted with their failures and choose to flee, their outcomes and trajectories are very different. One suggests growth and maturation, the other suggests recidivism.

Filmed in 1962, this film captures a behind the scenes look at part of the making of the John Schlesinger film, Billy Liar (1963). This film gives an interesting look at the production of Billy Liar as portions of the Leeds and Bradford location shoots have been documented on this film. For example, anticipating some tragic news, Billy’s internal monologue is “I prayed: please, God, let me feel something.” But when the news is delivered, he continues internally, “I examined what I was feeling and it was nothing, nothing.”

Billy Liar: Waterhouse, Keith, Bentley, Nick: 9781939140302

Of course, like all lazy sods, what he wants to be is a scriptwriter. And this dream is, supposedly, on the verge of being fulfilled - comedian Danny Boon has written to Billy offering him a job down in London. Yeah, right. The other one's got bells on Billy! A lazy, irresponsible young clerk (Sir Tom Courtenay) in provincial Northern England lives in his own fantasy world and makes emotionally immature decisions as he alienates friends and family. It has been suggested that a local newspaper columnist parodied in both the book and the film bears a remarkable resemblance to the late-life Keith Waterhouse himself, when he was ensconced at the Daily Mail. [3] Waterhouse was of the mimetic school of writers, managing to capture the unique patter of his Yorkshire dialect and local turn of phrase without becoming exclusive or alienating those of us who aren't local or even reading 53 years after publication. It is this quality that stands Billy Liar head and shoulders above others of the time, it hasn't dated because at its heart there are no politics, young men still struggle with their identity and purpose in life and suffer from being misunderstood by those closest to them. This article needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed.In 2007, Empire praised Tom Courtenay for the main role stating: "Skulking between temerity and timidity, callousness and innocence, Tom Courtenay dominates the picture, whether defrauding his employers or duping his trio of girlfriends. But the most memorable moment remains the sight of Julie Christie on the train to London, watching Courtenay shrugging on the platform and settling for the mediocrity he despises and probably deserves." [8] This terrific fearlessly funny book reflects the mind of a type of kid reluctantly becoming an adult. I am of this type. Billy Fisher is a dreamy, ironic, funny kid confronted with conformity and small minds in a small town in England circa 1953. It all seems so pointless to Billy that he greases his path and enlivens the journey by embellishing the truth, making things up, well if one wants to call it that, and many do, lying.

Keith Waterhouse - Wikipedia Keith Waterhouse - Wikipedia

And there is enough of a cliffhanger to keep you wanting to know: will Billy go to London (and leave his troubles and his two-and-a-half fiancees behind) or will he stay to face the music?a b "Keith Waterhouse: Leeds author and playwright dies". Yorkshire Evening Post . Retrieved 4 September 2009. Some people may feel that "Billy Liar" is nothing but a comic diversion. How could a novel about a rather bumbling and ineffectual dreamer with a tendency to twist the truth be a mirror reflecting the issues and concerns of an entire generation? In my opinion, that is exactly what Keith Waterhouse managed to do here.