The Story Archive

Billy Liar

John Schlesinger · 1963 CE · Film · English · Contemporary

An undertaker's clerk in a Yorkshire town lies to his family, his employers and the two girls he has managed to get engaged to, escaping between scrapes into Ambrosia, an invented country where he is president, general and adored. Julie Christie arrives swinging her bag through the demolition sites as Liz, the one person offering him a real train south instead of a daydream. From Keith Waterhouse's 1959 novel and the Waterhouse–Willis Hall stage version, neither in this archive, it let fantasy sequences into kitchen-sink realism and marked the cycle's pivot from anger to irony.

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