Billy Liar review – Tom Courtenay is superb in classic study of a young man and his quixotic dreams

Courtenay gives a beautiful performance as the undertaker’s clerk who nurses preposterous ambitions. But the film is too quick to surrender them This is John Schlesinger’s much-loved British comedy from 1963, based on the 1959 novel by Keith Waterhouse, itself part of the now almost forgotten Angry Young Man movement of which John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger and Kingsley Amis’s Lucky Jim were the other two classic texts – though perhaps it is really only Osborne’s hero who is actually angry. Tom Courtenay plays Billy, a cheeky, naughty young man who is as daft as a brush and lives semi-perman

This story was reported by Culture | The Guardian. EUROPES curates Europe's most relevant coverage — read the full report at the original source.