Billy Liar

<i>Billy Liar</i> is a 1963 British film that captures the monumental changes of the era: the sexual revolution and the destruction of England's old town centres in modernisation schemes. In Bradford, Yorkshire young Billy Fisher (Tom Courtenay) is working a soul-crushing job in a funeral home and suffering daily the derision of his elderly parents. His only escape from this drudgery is his active imagination, where he imagines himself leader of his own country and misleads other townspeople about his family's situation with little fibs. His propensity to make things up and shrug off his responsibilities, however, leads him to end up dating two women at the same time (Helen Fraser and Gwendolyn Watts), though ultimately he dreams of escapin...

Tom Courtenay is "Billy", a lad whose grasp on reality is, well, tenuous. In his dreams, he is a brave and valiant life-saving sort of fellow. In real life he is a lowly clerk who works for a funeral director and lives with his increasingly exasperated parents. His problems only increase as he struggles to differentiate between his real life and that in his fictional land of "Ambrosia" and as his fantasies develop, he becomes more and more alienated from those around them. In the end, it is really only the happy-go-lucky "Liz" (Julie Christie) who might be capable of offering him a yellow brick road back to his, admittedly, rather dreary and relentless reality. Her imminent relocation from provincial Yorkshire to London might offer him salv...