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.

A Kind of Loving (John Schlesinger, 1962)

June Ritchie and Alan Bates in A Kind of Loving

Cast: Alan Bates, June Ritchie, Thora Hird, Bert Palmer, Pat Keen, James Bolam, Jack Smethurst, Gwen Nelson, John Ronane, David Mahlowe, Patsy Rowlands. Screenplay: Willis Hall, Keith Waterhouse, based on a novel by Stan Barstow. Cinematography: Denys N. Coop. Art direction: Ray Simm. Film editing: Roger Cherrill. Music: Ron Grainer.

What we call "the Fifties" -- including the sexual naïveté and conformity to societal norms -- lasted well into the 1960s, as John Schlesinger's first feature film, A Kind of Loving, demonstrates. It also features Alan Bates in his first starring role as Vic Brown, a young man who lets his hormones and adherence to the values of his working-class family and dreary factory town trap him into a marriage to Ingrid Rothwell, a young woman he quickly falls out of love with. Bates is still a bit green as a film actor -- he hasn't yet developed the sexy bravura that would make him a star in films like Philippe de Broca's King of Hearts (1966), Ken Russell's Women in Love (1969), Joseph Losey's The Go-Between (1971), or Paul Mazursky's An Unmarried Woman (1968) -- but he gives a convincing performance. June Ritchie, who plays the tempting but essentially innocent Ingrid in what was also her debut film, never made it as a big star in an era dominated by the likes of Julie Christie, Vanessa Redgrave, and Glenda Jackson. The film's villain is Thora Hird as Ingrid's sour, shrewish, widowed mother, who dooms whatever chances the marriage had. The film is a bit slow to start -- it spends too much time on establishing Vic's family and work milieu before settling down to the business of the ill-fated relationship of Vic and Ingrid -- and it's less successful in its portrayal of the postwar British working class than such films as Karel Reisz's Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1960) and Tony Richardson's The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner (1962).