Misfortunes of Imaginary Beings: 02/26/20

A blog formerly known as Bookishness / By Charles Matthews

"Dazzled by so many and such marvelous inventions, the people of Macondo ... became indignant over the living images that the prosperous merchant Bruno Crespi projected in the theater with the lion-head ticket windows, for a character who had died and was buried in one film and for whose misfortune tears had been shed would reappear alive and transformed into an Arab in the next one. The audience, who had paid two cents apiece to share the difficulties of the actors, would not tolerate that outlandish fraud and they broke up the seats. The mayor, at the urging of Bruno Crespi, explained in a proclamation that the cinema was a machine of illusions that did not merit the emotional outbursts of the audience. With that discouraging explanation many ... decided not to return to the movies, considering that they already had too many troubles of their own to weep over the acted-out misfortunes of imaginary beings."
--Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

Wednesday, February 26, 2020

Billy Liar (John Schlesinger, 1963)

Tom Courtenay and Julie Christie in Billy Liar

Cast: Tom Courtenay, Wilfred Pickles, Mona Washbourne, Ethel Griffies, Finlay Currie, Gwendolyn Watts, Helen Fraser, Julie Christie, Leonard Rossiter, Rodney Bewes, George Innes, Leslie Randall. Screenplay: Keith Waterhouse, Willis Hall, based on a novel by Waterhouse and a play by Waterhouse and Hall. Cinematography: Denys N. Coop. Art direction: Ray Simm. Film editing: Roger Cherrill. Music: Richard Rodney Bennett.

Tom Courtenay's performance as a Yorkshire Baron Munchausen and Julie Christie's smallish role as the former girlfriend who almost rescues him from a life of boredom and mendacity went a long way toward establishing them as major British stars of the 1960s. Courtenay's about-face from the seriousness of The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner (Tony Richardson, 1962) to the comedy of Billy Liar singled him out as an actor of great versatility. Christie would follow her role as the devil-may-care Liz by winning an Oscar for another John Schlesinger film, Darling (1965), in which she revealed the unhappy emptiness behind the façade of celebrity. But they're hardly the only fine performances in this exploration of the consequences of tedium in a provincial town where London looms like Moscow in Chekhov's The Three Sisters. Mona Washbourne and Wilfred Pickles are Billy Fisher's exasperated parents, Ethel Griffies his garrulous grandmother, and Gwendolyn Watts and Helen Fraser are the highly contrasting young women Billy has managed to get himself engaged to -- one of his less disastrous escapes into his fantasy world. It's a comedy with an edge, but it never lets that edginess overwhelm the comedy, keeping a nice balance of both. I'm not a big fan of Schlesinger's more celebrated films Darling and Midnight Cowboy (1969), in which I think he loses control of the tone too often, but Billy Liar seems to me to get it just right.