There's not much plot to Billy Liar, but Keith Waterhouse in writing the original novel and John Schlesinger in making the film were obviously paying homage to that most beloved of American fictional characters, Walter Mitty. Tom Courtenay who got a breakthrough career role in the title part is nothing less than a British version of James Thurber's eternal dreamer.

Courtenay plays William Terrence Fisher nicknamed Billy Liar for all the fantastic tales he spins. He's got a dead end job working in a funeral parlor and he fills his days by imagining himself the king of the mythical country of Ambrosia. But he's full of plans and in the course of spinning his stories he gets himself to two girls, Gwendolyn Watts and Helen Fraser, while really loving Julie Christie. Christie is the only one who can pull him into some kind of reality.

The young man is also driving his poor middle class parents Wilfred Pickles and Mona Washborne to distraction. They've got enough on their hands with Ethel Griffies who is Courtenay's grandmother and lives with them, bringing along all her attendant problems of old age.

Both Tom Courtenay and Julie Christie received their first notice in Billy Liar and certainly both have gone on to distinguished careers. The location shooting in various places in Yorkshire certainly give it a nice authentic ring that even a Yank like myself can appreciate.

As there's no real plot, there's no real ending to the story and it does leave you wondering if young Courtenay is ever going to have a reality check. That open ending also probably made it possible for the BBC to make it a television comedy which until researching for this review, I hadn't known they had. I don't think the BBC show ever made it to this side of the pond.

After over 45 years Billy Liar still holds up quite well because dreams and their dreamers will always be with us.

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.

BILLY LIAR is another kitchen sink drama that didn't make much of an impact on me; the star's LONELINESS OF THE LONG DISTANCE RUNNER seemed to have much more to say, whereas this feels like a mild satire. The main character is a Walter Mitty-style fantasist whose imaginings and flights of fancy get more than a little annoying before long, while the usual romantic interludes and family drama are strictly by rote.