<i>Billy Liar</i> is a 1963 British film that captures the monumental changes of the era: the sexual revolution and the destruction of England's old town centres in modernisation schemes. In Bradford, Yorkshire young Billy Fisher (Tom Courtenay) is working a soul-crushing job in a funeral home and suffering daily the derision of his elderly parents. His only escape from this drudgery is his active...

Tom Courtenay is "Billy", a lad whose grasp on reality is, well, tenuous. In his dreams, he is a brave and valiant life-saving sort of fellow. In real life he is a lowly clerk who works for a funeral director and lives with his increasingly exasperated parents. His problems only increase as he struggles to differentiate between his real life and that in his fictional land of "Ambrosia" and as his ...