2:32pm Friday 26th June 2009
Billy Liar (1963)
Shot on location in Baildon, Bradford and Leeds between October and December, 1962, Billy Liar was released the following year by VIC Films Ltd.
The city of Bradford is one of the stars of Room At The Top, its sequel and Billy Liar. Screenings at the National Media Museum are invariably packed because the films show parts of the city centre that no longer exist.
Willis Hall and Keith Waterhouse’s story, an English version of the fictional American character Walter Mitty, has been a play, a novel, a movie, a musical and a TV series.
Undertaker’s clerk Billy Fisher fantasises about living the high life as a comedy scriptwriter and song-writer, but cannot resist telling whoppers to make his drab life more interesting. He has two fiancees but the love of his life, Liz, is a free spirit who does what she says she’s going to do – unlike Billy.
A memorable cast stars Tom Courtenay, Julie Christie, Leonard Rossiter, Wilfred Pickles, Rodney Bewes and Finlay Currie.
Tony Earnshaw, author of the Made In Yorkshire film history, says: “Billy Liar burst on to the screen as part of the British ‘New Wave’ that had begun in the late 1950s with the kitchen-sink revolution that had produced Look Back In Anger (directed by Bradford-born Tony Richardson), A Kind Of Loving and Saturday Night And Sunday Morning.”
© Copyright 2001-2012 Newsquest Media Group
http://www.thetelegraphandargus.co.uk/trade_directory/