r (Tom Courtenay) of Billy Liar, "uncertain what they do want from society" (Murphy 126). This movie is, in several ways, a transitional film. Although Armes deplores Schlesinger's "squandering [of] the possibilities of a new realism" in Billy Liar it does not seem that it was the director's intention to do anything of the kind (247). Instead Schlesinger's film is filled with Billy's abrupt, absurd daydreams that reflect an interest in a style unconnected with complete realism. The film also features an infusion of light-heartedness and hope into the sad life of Billy Fisher in the form of Julie Christie's Liz, "an icon of escape [who] is his soulmate, sexually free and secure" and chooses London over dreary Manchester (Richards 157-58). Billy, despite his desperate frustration with his very dull job, critical parents and conventional girlfriends (one conventionally prim, the other with conventionally loose morals) cannot bring himself to leave home, terrible as he truly finds it to be. The sad ending of the film is true to the cinema of youthfu
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