'Billy Liar' Studies (in Memory of Keith Waterhouse)

Film Studies For Free was saddened to hear that novelist, journalist, and screenwriter Keith Waterhouse has died, albeit after a long and rich life. He was author of the novel Billy Liar and wrote the critically acclaimed screenplay for John Schlesinger's brilliant 1963 film of the same name, one of FSFF's favourites from the British New Wave. He also worked on other great screenplays, including Whistle Down the Wind (1961), A Kind of Loving (1962) and Alfred Hitchcock's Torn Curtain (1966, uncredited).

Below, in memory of Keith Waterhouse's great British cinematic imagination, are some links to online and openly accessible Billy Liar and British New Wave cinema resources:

• Tony Aldgate, 'British New Wave Cinema', Open2.net, November 2002
  
• 'Billy Liar', Monthly Film Bulletin Review, Volume 30, No.356, September 1963
• Michael Brooke, 'The British Hero: Heroic Failures', BFI Screenonline
• Director's Guild of Great Britain, Lifetime Achievement Award to John Schlesinger, Booklet 2002
• Mark Duguid, 'British Film in the 1960s', BFI Screenonline
  
• Bruce Goldstein, 'Billy Liar', The Criterion Collection, Essays, July 9, 2001
• Roderick Heath, 'Look Back: Influences and Major Figures of the British Free Cinema', Ferdy on Films, etc, February 20, 2002
• Justin Hindmarsh, 'British Cinema Style and Context: An Examination of British "New Wave" Films', Leicester Discussion Papers in Mass Communications, 1997
• Gavin Lambert, 'New Wave, Old Problem', The Guardian Online, October 3, 2002
  
• A.O. Scott, 'Billy Liar', The Criterion Collection, Essays, July 9, 2001
• B. F. Taylor, 'Major Themes and Minor Movements: Composition and Repetition in John Schlesinger's Billy Liar', in British New Wave: A Certain Tendency (Manchester University Press, 2006) (full disclosure note: work based on a thesis supervised by Catherine Grant)
  
• Phil Wickham, 'Billy Liar (1963), BFI Screenonline