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. Everyone loves Billy Liar, that classic 60s British picture directed by John Schlesinger, starring Tom Courtenay as Billy himself – the bright, cheeky lad, daft as a brush, lost in his own Walter Mitty fantasies. 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. The film provides a rare glimpse behind the scenes of a major film made in Yorkshire. The film was based on the novel of the same name by Leeds writer Keith Waterhouse, written in 1957. Waterhouse claimed that the film wasn’t autobiographical, even though he too had had a dead end job as a clerk at an undertaker's before escaping to Fleet Street. He went on to adapt it for the stage, and worked with Willis Hall, another Leeds man, on the screenplay for the film. Waterhouse went on to write some 20 novels and the same number of plays, as well as being an extraordinary prolific and highly regarded newspaper columnist with the Daily Mirror and the Daily Mail. The film is one of many made in Yorkshire (see the book Made In Yorkshire, which provides details and an excellent overview of these films, in References). John Schlesinger, seen directing in the film, later also made Yanks in nearby Keighley in 1978. Schlesinger won an Oscar for director of Midnight Cowboy in 1969, which also won best film.Tom Courtenay, who was born in Hull, featured in many films located in Yorkshire, including The Dresser, also partly filmed in Bradford at the Alhambra Theatre. This co-starred Albert Finney who had played the Tom Courtenay part, Billy Fisher, on stage, but turned down playing the part in the film. Having starred in The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner the previous year, Billy Liar established Tom Courtenay, playing the lead character Billy Fisher, as a major actor.

Billy Liar by Keith Waterhouse | Goodreads

Forgotten the title or the author of a book? Our BookSleuth is specially designed for you. Visit BookSleuth The film also starred Julie Christie making her first major film role. Julie only took the role, of Liz, after the first choice, Topsy Jane, had to drop out because of illness. All the scenes she had appeared in had to be re-done. An interesting feature of this film is that it was made when they were shooting the original version: it is Topsy Jane and not Julie Christie who is with Tom Courtenay at the top of Leeds Town Hall steps – an early scene in the film. Playing entirely different kinds of characters, Tom Courtenay and Julie Christie also appeared together two years later in Dr Zhivago. Andrew Higson, ‘Space, Place, Spectacle: Landscape and Township in the ‘Kitchen Sink’ Film’, in Andrew Higson (ed.), Dissolving Views: Key Writings on British Cinema, Cassell, London, 1996. Billy Liar is the story of an undertaker’s clerk, Billy Fisher, who longs to escape his monotonous existence for the bright lights of London to become a scriptwriter. But his life is one long round of tightly knotted, but steadily fraying lies. Ever the dreamer, Billy weaves an ever-growing web of deceit as his outrageous fantasies spiral out of control. The film was shot on location in Yorkshire between October and December, 1962. Billy Liar has been classed among a series of films made in the late 1950s and early 1960s as ‘kitchen sink dramas’: dramas that are viewed as being socially or morally realistic. These usually have a domestic setting – although the film The Kitchen (1961), directed by Yorkshireman James Hill of an Arnold Wesker play, is set in a hotel kitchen. It is interesting to set Billy Liar against another film made the year before, A Taste of Honey, adapted for film in 1961 by Tony Richardson from the play by Shelagh Delaney. This is perhaps the most challenging of the ‘kitchen sink dramas’. Like other films made by ‘New Wave’ directors, Billy Liar, with its stereotyped female characters, can be accused of a certain misogyny – although the male characters are equally stereotyped and Liz represents someone new and different. But A Taste of Honey goes beyond the issue of class to openly explore race, gender and sexual orientation at a time when few others were doing so. It went on to win four BAFTA film awards, best actor (Murray Melvin) and best actress (Rita Tushingham) at Cannes (1962), and Tony Richardson and Shelagh Delaney between them won the Writer’s Guild Award (1963).

Kenneth Allsop, The Angry Decade: a survey of the cultural revolt of the nineteen-fifties, 2nd edition, Peter Owen Limited, London, 1964. The publication of Billy Liar – 50 years ago this month – was a groundbreaking event. Keith Waterhouse's early novel proved to be his best, featuring regional speech, working-class characters and, best of all, a central character whose name would pass into popular mythology. The novel's timing was impeccable – as highlighted in a programme broadcast last week on Radio 4. Poet and author Blake Morrison travelled to Yorkshire to recall a world of sad cafés, suffocating expectations and sexual ignorance, which Billy Liar caught just before it vanished forever. In the novel, the philosophy of Stradhoughton's stoic survivors is summed up by a pub singer: "Now I think that life is merry, / And I think that life is fun, / A short life and a happy one, / Is my rule number one, / I laugh when it is raining, / I laugh when it is fine, / You may think that I am foolish, / But laughter is my line …" Although the character of Billy Fisher yearns to escape what he feels to be the drabness of his home town, the film itself leaves open the suggestion that maybe life here isn’t so bad, and is ultimately more rewarding than living a virtual one in ones head (or in the newer method of the internet). Perhaps what the film teaches is that it is relating to other people that really counts – which Billy never really manages to do.