Billy Liar footage shows a piece of cinematic history

The following day, April 14, the movie Billy Liar will be screened. Five days later, on the 19th, another related event takes place at Bradford Cathedral: the screening of a four-minute film of scenes for Billy Liar being shot in Leeds on a chilly day in October, 1962.

This film was made by Leeds local cine enthusiast David Chapman. It found its way to the Yorkshire Film Archive in York via Tony Earnshaw, formerly a director of the BIFF, while he was working on a project on Bradford on Film, and which resulted in the 2008 book Made in Yorkshire, which Earnshaw compiled with photographer Jim Moran.

Most people associate Billy Liar with Bradford. As Tony Earnshaw says in the book, director John Schlesinger and producer Joseph Janni were intent on shooting the film where the story by Keith Waterhouse and Willis Hall was set: an imaginary industrial town in Yorkshire.

“They settled on Bradford and selected locations across the city and its suburbs. Scenes were shot in Southgate, Petergate, Forster Square, Bank Street, Midland Road, Broadway, Cheapside, Church Bank, Undercliffe Cemetery, the war memorial on Prince’s Way and the Locarno ballroom on Manningham Lane.

“Billy’s house was a real residence: ‘Hillcrest’, 37 Hinchcliffe Avenue, Baildon. It was considered perfect for the job and barely altered, unless one ignores the gnomes surreptitiously added to the garden.”

But dream sequences in the film, in which Billy Fisher imagines himself as a liberating military hero, were shot in Leeds, as David Chapman’s film shows.

According to the Yorkshire Film Archive’s website, on which much of the following is based, one weekend in 1962, David had returned to Leeds to find the filming of Billy Liar almost on his doorstep, and rushed home to get his cine camera to film the production.

Filming was going on near Chapman’s old school, Green Lane School, off Tom Road where he lived, and this can be seen in the Billy Liar film.

Seemingly unconcerned by the 22-year-old graphic arts photographer roaming around the set with his Kodak cine camera – being careful not to get in the way – the film crew carried on as usual and he was able to capture the filming.

His little film provides a rare glimpse behind the scenes of a major film made in Yorkshire. The film was based on the 1957 novel which Keith Waterhouse claimed 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 via a Leeds-based newspaper.

John Schlesinger’s film shows a fascinating glimpse of Bradford when it was at the height of its post-war transformation. In 1962 the Swan Arcade, where JB Priestley had his first job, was being demolished at the time this film was made.

It was replaced by Arndale House, built by the corrupt building developer John Poulson.

This rebuilding work can possibly be seen in the background in the film, and having this in may well have been deliberate on the part of the filmmakers.

Keith Waterhouse was to later write about what he saw as the wanton destruction of city centres: “I would put most of the blame on the councillors who invite and encourage the laying-waste of their own townships. The trouble is that many of them are not very bright.” In 1962 John Betjeman described the growing structures of glass and concrete as ‘international nothingness’.

The film was one of many made in Yorkshire over the next 50 years. John Schlesinger, who can be seen directing in David’s film, later made Yanks in Keighley in 1978.

Hull-born Tom Courtenay 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 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 as a major actor.

The film also starred Bingley-born Rodney Bewes, Halifax-born Wilfred Pickles, and Julie Christie, appearing in her first major film role. She 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 David Chapman’s 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, yawning and trying to keep warm, at the top of Leeds Town Hall steps – an early scene in the film.

Both the novel and the film emerged out of post war 1950s Britain when a new generation of talented artists appeared.

There was a movement in literature, the theatre and cinema towards examining working class life, and locating this more in the provinces – some came to be known as part of the ‘Movement’ with a capital ‘M’. Pioneering in this were Shipley-born Tony Richardson, whose 1963 film Tom Jones won two Oscars, Karel Reisz and Lindsay Anderson. Through a programme of screenings at the National Film Theatre between 1956–59, they formed the Free Cinema movement, and along with John Schlesinger and Jack Clayton, the British New Wave. Although this was not entirely new, it was distinctive in having a more youthful edge and in taking a less passive perspective. In Billy Liar this is represented by the character of Liz, who in the film escapes from Billy Fisher’s dead end world for London.

Many of the novels and films of the early 1960s reflected a post-war period when there were more educational opportunities for working class children.

This, together with new trends in youth culture, created a distance from the generation of their parents. Billy Liar has a comic scene that may well have inspired the Four Yorkshiremen sketch from At Last the 1948 Show, and later Monty Python.

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 one’s 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.

To mark the 50th anniversary of Billy Liar, Studiocanal is releasing a fully-restored DVD on May 6. Special features include Tom Courtenay and Helen Fraser talking about the film, a look through the archive of the late Keith Waterhouse, and a selection of photographs from the film.