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Billy Liar. (Home Video).-

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Directed by John Schlesinger; screenplay by Keith Waterhouse and Willis Hall; cinematography by Denys Coop; music by Richard Rodney Bennett; edited by Roger Cherrill; starring Tom Courtenay, Julie Christie, Wilfred Pickles, Mona Washbourne, Fin lay Currie, Leonard Rossiter. B&W, 98 mins., DVD. A Criterion Collection release.

John Schlesinger is a British director who has had an extremely uneven career. For a number of years he worked in Hollywood where most of his films, like Day of the Locust (1975) and Marathon Man (1979), were either pedestrian or shrilly over-the-top. But then one remembers his haunting evocation of a rotting, melancholy Times Square in Midnight Cowboy (1969).

His early work in Britain, such as A Kind of Loving (1962) and Billy Liar (1963), includes some of his best films. A Kind of Loving was probably the most understated and least melodramatic of the New Wave of British working-class social-realist films of the early Sixties. A Kind of Loving's central characters are neither angry, rebellious males nor social outsiders, but ordinary white-collar workers, who are pressured to...

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