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John Schlesinger's

PRODUCTION CREDITS

CAST

"BILLY LIAR" - THE NOVEL

"Lying in bed, I abandoned the facts and was back in Ambrosia."
-opening paragraph of "Billy Liar"

Billy Liar began life as a novel by 30-year-old newspaperman Keith Waterhouse. It's hard to believe that a side of Billy Fisher, Waterhouse's tale-spinning, eternally-procrastinating protagonist, was modeled on the author himself, one of England's most prolific writers - author of 13 novels, 7 non-fiction books (including two volumes of memoirs), and scores of plays, screenplays, TV series, and children's books, in addition to thousands of newspaper articles (his Monday and Thursday column in London's Daily Mail has appeared regularly for the past 30 years). After all, Billy's own novel never gets further than the title - which he constantly revises in the ultimate act of procrastination.

But, in Streets Ahead, the author's second volume of memoirs¹, Waterhouse admits, "[I am] fundamentally an idler...When friends profess to marvel at the quantity of my output...I think of the small inner voice that is telling me for heaven's sake to get off my back and get some work done."

This was his frame of mine when attempting to complete his first novel, There Is a Happy Land. Luckily, he managed to get past the title; that first effort proved such a success that he decided to quit his day job (features writer for London's Daily Mirror tabloid) in order to pursue the literary life full-time (although, in fact, to this day he has never really quit the newspaper game.)

But having a successful first novel has its pitfalls. Wrote Waterhouse, "Writing a second novel when the first has been a success can be a daunting exercise. Everyone knows that everyone has a first novel in them...but how many have a second novel in them?"

Undeterred, Waterhouse wrote down a title - The Young Man's Magnificat - in a "shiny little memorandum book," which he now admits was "another work-avoidance technique - I have never been one for making notes, although I have always been one for possessing notebooks."

But he soon found "the old indolence...melted away entirely...I packed my family off on holiday, locked the doors and jumped in at the deep end. During this period I did not answer the telephone or doorbell, shave, wash very much, or eat more than sandwiches. After three weeks, a novel by this time called Saturday Night at the Roxy, concerning an estate agent's clerk called Norman Fisher who has vague ambitions of becoming a writer, had transferred itself into a novel called Billy Liar about an undertaker's clerk named Billy Fisher who is a compulsive liar and daydreamer. I finished at 4am on a Sunday. I woke up at seven the following evening and by half past seven I was extremely drunk."

Waterhouse drew on his own adolescence in the Yorkshire city of Leeds - although Waterhouse's own circumstances were humbler than Billy's lower-middle-class existence. One detail that comes directly from the author's own life is the undertaking parlor - Waterhouse himself had clerked in such an establishment ("I took the job just to use the typewriter," he confided recently.)

Only one line of dialogue in the book and film is completely authentic. Recalls Waterhouse, "I hadn't been on the job for five minutes when the owner pointed to a coffin and said to the clerks, 'Now you do know that's the late Mr. Parkin you've got in there? 'Cause we don't want another recurrence of last week's fiasco, do we?' I remember thinking to myself, 'This is going to be good.'"

Waterhouse wasn't prepared for Billy Liar's reception when first published in 1959. "[It was] an instant success; in fact in the climate of the time it was among the handful of books that attracted a buzz even before they were on the shelves."

"The reviews were all I could have wished for. 'A sad, savage, sick, funny book,' said John Bowen in the Sunday Times. 'A brilliantly funny book, rich in absurdities and beautifully edged writing' - Times Literary Supplement. These and more went to embellish the dust jacket of the American edition, published only two or three months later, when it was equally well received.

"I did like 'An English Salinger has burst upon the scene'," recalls Waterhouse. "But as that was from the Los Angeles Mirror News, not noted for its literary clout, I preferred the Boston Globe's 'A masterpiece of youth, imagination and laughter.'"

But the less-than-prestigious L.A. Mirror News wasn't the only paper to make the Salinger comparison. Review after review compared Billy favorably to The Catcher in the Rye - as well as to Kingsley Amis' Lucky Jim and Colin MacInnes's just-published "youth-cult-novel" Absolute Beginners. John Updike wrote that Waterhouse "gives us adolescence full-bodied in its raucous ferocity...I would not really want this excellent book any different." Waterhouse soon found himself in the (somewhat-ghettoized) company of northern working class writers like John Osborne, John Braine, Alan Sillitoe, Alun Owen, and other "angry young men" - a label they all loathed, particularly Waterhouse, who wasn't really all that angry about anything.

Billy Liar has never been out of print in the U.K., where it's required high school reading. Wrote Waterhouse, "Billy...was destined, or doomed, to become a school textbook, when plodding pamphlets of 'study aids'...were written about it, learnedly explaining the text - 'Shags like a rattlesnake - sexually promiscuous.'"

"BILLY LIAR" - THE PLAY

Disappointed that the film rights had already been sold, Hall quickly convinced Waterhouse that the book would still make a "marvelous play" and that they should pick up where they'd left off at the age of 16 by collaborating on the dramatization. Within three weeks, they completed the adaptation, having tackled the problem of "converting an 190-page novel in a couple of dozen scenes into a seventy-page play in one composite set."

A producer found, the most pressing problem was casting the title role. "Albert Finney [who'd worked with Hall in radio]...was the first and obvious choice...While he hummed and hawed - around [this] time he was being tested by David Lean for Lawrence of Arabia - there was some talk of Tommy Steele² playing the part. Perhaps fortunately for all concerned, Tommy elected to do [a play] at the Old Vic, Albert turned down Lawrence, and we were in business."

[Thirty years later, the young man who did accept the film role of Lawrence, Peter O'Toole, would have one the biggest stage successes of his career as an alcoholic newspaper columnist in Waterhouse's Jeffrey Bernard is Unwell.]

As directed by Lindsay Anderson, the stage Billy Liar was as big a sensation as the novel - but only after a shaky start. As the curtain came down at its first preview in Brighton, Waterhouse & Hall heard "boos" coming from the gallery.

"What had the galleryites taken exception to?" wondered Waterhouse in his memoirs. "The northern setting, the way Billy treated his grandmother, his engagement equivalent of bigamy, the raw teenage dialogue - what? The house manager put us right. It was the epithet 'bloody,' with which Billy's father punctuates practically every sentence." Waterhouse points out that when Jeffrey Bernard opened three decades later, O'Toole's first word was "shit" and the second "fuck," both of which brought the house down. The changing times and all that.

Billy's opening weeks in the West End's Cambridge Theatre were less than brilliant, failing to fill the 1200-seat "barnlike" house. But six weeks after the opening, the film Saturday Night and Sunday Morning appeared with its sensational young star, Albert Finney. Publicity talked about his current "West End hit." And when the BBC aired a segment of the play, the show's "instant" success was clinched.

Nine months into the run, Finney was released to do John Osborne's Luther. His Billy replacement was Tom Courtenay, a rapidly rising star who'd been at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts with Finney³.

"It was fascinating to contrast their performances," wrote Waterhouse. "Albert's 'I am star!' Billy, Tom's 'I wish I were a star!' Billy. Both interpretations are equally correct, for locked in Billy Fisher's tangled psyche are both characters, star and nonentity."

In his own autobiography, Dear Tom, just published in the U.K.⁴, Courtenay contrasts the tempo of the two performances: "Though strictly speaking I was better casting for the part, being physically slighter and altogether more of a daydreamer, they must have missed the panache and confidence of his rendition. And the speed of it. Albert was going like an express. When I took over, George A. Cooper, playing Billy's dad, had to get a later train home."

Continues Courtenay, "...[Lindsay Anderson wanted] me to do imaginative exercises during rehearsals as Albert had...He was very keen that I imagine Billy's fantasy world, Ambrosia. Albert had drawn a map of Ambrosia and stuck it on the inside of the sideboard door, downstage right. I couldn't have cared less about Ambrosia. I didn't need to imagine Billy's fantasy world. It was in every molecule of my body and I have been practicing it since childhood."

Courtenay soon made the character his own. The West End run was followed by a major tour throughout the provinces and finally came to Broadway in 1965. Other foreign productions have included the Turkish Yalanci Bili, the Polish Klamer Billy, and an Irish adaptation in which our Billy tries escaping from Cork to Dublin.

"BILLY LIAR" - THE FILM

But Janni made Waterhouse the best offer: a three-picture deal beginning with the adaptation of Stan Barstow's best-selling novel A Kind of Loving (1962), a slice-of-northern-life drama that marked the first feature for director John Schlesinger, who'd already made a name for himself by winning first prize at Venice for his 45-minute documentary Terminus, a day in the life of London's Waterloo Station.

Coming in the wake of Room at the Top, The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, and other British New Wave milestones, A Kind of Loving was initially dismissed as yet another "kitchen sink" drama - until it won the Golden Bear at the Berlin Film Festival. Seen from today's perspective, A Kind of Loving holds up better than most of its contemporaries - while its shock value has completely evaporated, this story of a Lancashire draftsman (Alan Bates) who's forced to marry a pretty, but empty-headed, secretary when he gets her "in trouble" can now be seen as a raison d'etre for the sexual revolution, just then cooling its heels around the corner.

For Billy Liar, Janni employed Loving's production team, including cinematographer Denys Coop, art director Ray Simm, and, of course, Schlesinger. (Janni and Schlesinger would go on to produce a string of hits together, including Darling, Far from the Madding Crowd and Sunday Bloody Sunday.)

The success of Kind of Loving cemented the play and screenwriting partnership of Waterhouse & Hall - now officially in business together with their Waterhall Productions⁵ - and they were naturally paired again for the Billy Liar screenplay. (The film's opening credits, however, erroneously give the source material as "Based on the novel and play by Keith Waterhouse and Willis Hall.")

Casting Billy was not the problem it had been for the play's producers. The character was by now virtually owned by both Finney and Courtenay - no other actor could possibly be considered. (A third possibility, Anthony Newley, was quickly dismissed.) In the end, Schlesinger chose the more introverted Courtenay, who by this time had become a major film star himself with Richardson's The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner.

Two other actors were cast directly from the play, both of whom had worked with both Courtenay and Finney: Mona Washbourne as Billy's long-suffering mum; and, as Billy's senile grandmother, Ethel Griffies, who, two years later, would repeat her stage and screen role in the Broadway production - at age 88. The aptly-named Wilfred Pickles would step in as Billy's sourpuss dad.

Funeral directors Shadrack & Duxbury didn't appear in the one-set play, but Waterhouse & Hall brought them to life for the movie. Leonard Rossiter, then best known for his recurring role on the British TV series Z Cars (pronounced "Zed" Cars), was cast as the visionary undertaker Emanuel Shadrack - one of the first of his stand-out comic roles, which would include memorable turns in Kubrick's 2001 and Barry Lyndon. Rossiter, also famed for his TV series Rising Damp and The Fall and Rise of Reggie Perrin, has the distinction of doing what most actors only fantasize: he died on stage (or, close enough, during the interval - of Joe Orton's Loot).⁶

Shadrack's partner, the ancient, olde-Yorshire-accented Councillor Duxbury, would be played by 85-year-old Finlay Currie, veteran of over 100 films, but immortalized as the shaven-head convict Magwitch in David Lean's Great Expectations.

Helen Fraser, who'd had a brief comic role in A Kind of Loving, was cast as the prim, virginal Barbara, while Gwendolyn Watts became the foul-mouthed Rita.

But it was the part of the free-spirited Liz - who offers Billy both marriage and the chance to escape to London - that posed the greatest casting problem. The part was originally to be played by an actress with the unlikely name of Topsy Jane, who'd played Courtenay's girlfriend in Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner. A month into the 12-week-shoot, she suffered a nervous breakdown and was replaced by an unknown actress who'd already been tested and rejected by Schlesinger: Julie Christie, who'd previously had only small parts in two forgotten "quota quickies."

In fact, Topsy Jane was more physically suited to the role⁷: as described in the novel, Liz was slightly dumpy and dishevelled - hardly the description of the character's eventual screen incarnation.

The introduction of Liz/Christie in the film became the film's most famous sequence. David Shipman, in his seminal book The Great Movie Stars⁸, calls it "one of the most beguiling things in 60s cinema." Shipman opens his entry on Christie with a description of the scene: "...a long fugue in which she wanders gaily through the streets of a Northern town, swinging a large handbag. The sequence owes something to the nouvelle vague, and as that was a liberating movement, so is she a liberating spirit. She is Billy's escape route. He can pour out his troubles to her. She's the girl who's been around, who takes off when she feels like it and returns just as simply to the nest."

In his biography of David Lean⁹, Kevin Brownlow relates how that one scene influenced the casting of the decade's most epic film: upon seeing it, Lean immediately cast Christie as Lara in Doctor Zhivago, ending a long search on the spot. It's unknown whether it was Billy that also led to the casting of Tom Courtenay as Strelnikov in Zhivago - although it's startling to realize that Courtenay lets go of Christie in both movies.

Christie almost threatened to overshadow everything else about the movie. The (mostly male) critics couldn't suppress their enthusiasm (for want of a better word). Maybe the Newsweek critic went a little overboard with the opening paragraph of his review, in which he inserted the words "Julie Christie" between every line.

(The anonymous New Yorker critic reviewing Billy ended with this prescient note: "As for Miss Christie, I prophesy a fruitful career. I hope that in her next movie she is in London, in a charming flat, wearing exquisite clothes and speaking sentences that parse." That exactly describes her role two years later in Schlesinger's Darling, which won her the Best Actress Oscar.)

But, Christie-infatuated critics aside, Billy Liar was still a triumph for Schlesinger, Waterhouse & Hall and for 26-year-old Courtenay. Time magazine raved that Courtenay "brings off moments of pluperfect screen comedy," while Variety called him "probably the best of Britain's new wave of young actors." He wouldn't make as big a splash in a film until The Dresser in 1983. Next year, he'll be seen again by U.S. audiences as the star of Whatever Happened to Harold Smith?

Nominated for six British Academy Awards, Billy Liar has remained a classic in its native country. Last year, it was included in the British Film Institute's poll of The 100 Greatest British Films of All Time, rating higher than both Darling and A Hard Day's Night.

Billy Liar had its U.S. premiere (at the Coronet Theatre, 59th & 3rd Ave.) less than a month after Kennedy's assassination and two months before The Beatles' arrival on these shores - hardly good timing for a British comedy. But with rave reviews, it was still a hit, making international names of Schlesinger, Christie and Courtenay. (Perhaps it would have fared even better in the post-Beatles era when lower-middle-class lads from the north of England were suddenly the center of the universe.)

By the mid-1970s, its U.S. distributor had gone out of business - and the film disappeared from American screens. But Billy has still managed to acquire a cult following through its (extremely) occasional TV runs and a brief video appearance in the mid-1980s. The movie registered well enough in the public consciousness for the New York Post to splash the headline BILLY LIAR (describing the latest indiscretion of First Brother Billy Carter) across its front page of July 31, 1980 and for the Hoboken-based group Yo La Tengo to record a Billy Liar-inspired song called "Tom Courtenay." CBS even had a short-lived Billy TV series starring Steve Guttenberg in 1979. (In the U.K., Billy's had an even more impressive after-life, becoming both a hit TV series and a smash-hit West End musical, which one paper called "the best British musical since Oliver!." In 1975, even Waterhouse couldn't further ignore the character and wrote a sequel to the novel called Billy Liar on the Moon.)

Theatrical prints of the original movie, however, have been non-existent here since the 60s, particularly damaging to the film's reputation since it was shot in CinemaScope. On TV and video, it has been "panned-and-scanned" - resulting in a full two-thirds of the image being cropped. Rialto Pictures' recently made 35mm print had restored Billy to its original widescreen format for the first time in almost 40 years.

Full-sized reproduction of the original British BILLY LIAR poster
available at POSTERITATI.

NOTES BY BRUCE GOLDSTEIN
© 2000

WHAT CRITICS HAVE SAID ABOUT "BILLY LIAR"

"Made three years later than [Karel Reisz's] Saturday Night and Sunday Morning [the seminal "angry young man" drama starring Albert Finney], this is already in a different world. The back-to-backs¹⁰ are being torn down to make way for high-rise flats and supermarkets, gritty realism blossoms into flamboyant fantasy, and the feminine is now represented by kookie 'swinging 60s' Julie Christie. A warm, witty, sensitive film; whatever happened later, something stirred in British cinema in the 60s."
- Time Out Film Guide (London)

"Tom Courtenay is excellent in direct narrative passages at the office or with his family: the false ingratiations, the dormouse defiance, the impersonation of a hated acquaintance or the lightning assumption of the pound-note voice. The performance is an astonishing development of the performance he gave in the London stage production...As the debonair girl friend, Julie Christie makes an impression of coolness, charm and the promise of an actress. John Schlesinger's direction, I am delighted to say, is rich in wit."
- Dilys Powell, The Sunday Times (London, 1963)

"Billy Liar was so much discussed, as well as imitated, that it is a tribute to the care with which it was made that it remains still fresh today."
- David Shipman, The Story of Cinema (1984)

"So damned funny that you laugh until you cry...Billy Liar will be able to compete on any 10 Best List of the World this year."
- Archer Winsten, New York Post

"ONE OF THE GREAT MOVIES OF THE 1960s!
BRILLIANT COMEDY! PURE AMBROSIA!"
- A.O. Scott, New York Times (November 17, 2000)

JOHN SCHLESINGER

Schlesinger made his feature film directorial debut with A Kind of Loving, starring Alan Bates, which earned the Berlin Film Festival's Golden Bear Award. His second film, Billy Liar, established him as a fresh young stylist. He followed with the enormously successful Darling, also starring Julie Christie, for which he won the New York Film Critics Award for Best Director and earned his first Oscar nomination.

Schlesinger directed Christie in the critically-acclaimed Far from the Madding Crowd before making the milestone American film Midnight Cowboy, which earned him an Academy Award for Best Director - as well as a British Academy Award and the Directors Guild of America Award for Best Director.

After Midnight Cowboy, Schlesinger earned another Oscar nomination for his direction of the controversial Sunday, Bloody Sunday. Among his other films are The Day of the Locust, Marathon Man, Yanks, Honky Tonk Freeway, The Falcon and the Snowman, The Believers, Pacific Heights, The Innocent, and Eye for an Eye. His most recent film was The Next Best Thing. He also recently directed The Tales of Sweeney Todd for TV.

Schlesinger has also directed several successful projects for British TV, including the award-winning An Englishman Abroad, Separate Tables and A Question of Attribution. The made-for-TV Cold Comfort Farm was released theatrically in the United States.

Schlesinger has also brought his talents to the stage, directing plays for Britain's Royal Shakespeare Company and National Theatre, including productions of "Timon of Athens," "Heartbreak House," "Julius Caesar" and Sam Shepard's "True West." He made his operatic directing debut at Covent Garden with "Tales of Hoffman," starring Placido Domingo, and has since directed "Die Rosenkavalier" for the Royal Opera House, "Un Ballo in Mascherea" for the Salzberg Festival, and, this fall, "Peter Grimes" for the Los Angeles Opera.

Schlesinger was made a Commander of the British Empire by Queen Elizabeth II in her 1970 New Year's Honors.

TOM COURTENAY

Courtenay's critically-acclaimed comic performance in John Schlesinger's film version of Billy Liar was followed by Joseph Losey's King and Country, co-starring Dirk Bogarde. His performance as a dim-witted deserter during WWI won him the Best Actor prize at the Venice Film Festival. He has since played other impressive leading roles in U.K. and U.S. films, typically as a misunderstood, nonconforming youth. He received an Oscar nomination for his role as the bespectacled commissar Strelnikov in David Lean's Doctor Zhivago.

Courtenay's promising screen career inexplicably stalled in 1971, but his stage and television work continued to thrive. In 1977 he made a belated Broadway debut in "Otherwise Engaged."

Courtenay's return to the screen in 1983 was marked by an Academy Award nomination as Best Actor for his remarkable performance in The Dresser. Courtenay co-starred as the put-upon aide-de-camp of a selfish Shakespearean actor - played by the other Billy, Albert Finney. Courtenay and Finney would re-unite in similar roles for the BBC television play A Rather English Marriage in 1998 (aired in this country on "Masterpiece Theatre").

This year Courtenay has been in the spotlight again with two successes. First, for another triumphant return to the screen as a working-class father with psychic powers in the comedy Whatever Happened to Harry Smith? to be released here next spring by USA Films. (Ironically, his character is glued to the telly - the kind of character the young Courtenay would have rebelled against.)

And, second, his autobiography, Dear Tom - a reconstruction of his boyhood and early theatrical career using letters from his mother as a springboard - was published to great acclaim in the U.K.

- adapted from The Film Encyclopedia by Ephraim Katz

JULIE CHRISTIE

Born on her father's tea plantation in India and educated in England and France, Julie Christie trained at London's Central School of Music and Drama, making her stage debut with a repertory company in 1957. She began playing small roles in films in 1962 (Crooks Anonymous and The Fast Lady), but got the break of a lifetime when she replaced another actress as the leading lady of Billy Liar, directed by John Schlesinger.

Her relatively brief appearance in Billy Liar (1963) made Christie a star overnight. It was Schlesinger who provided her with a tailor-made role (perhaps inspired by a comment in The New Yorker - see press note) as a spoiled jet-setting high-fashion model in Darling (1965), which won her both a Best Actress Oscar and the New York Film Critics Award.

Christie went on to become a major star of British and Hollywood films throughout the 60s and 70s. Her introduction in Billy Liar - a New Wavish sequence in which she's seen swinging her purse her purse through town - so impressed David Lean that he immediately cast her as Lara in Doctor Zhivago. This was soon followed by starring roles in François s Truffaut's Farenheit 451, Joseph Losey's The Go-Between, Nicolas Roeg's Don't Look Now, Warren Beatty's Shampoo and Heaven Can Wait, and Robert Altman's McCabe and Mrs. Miller, for which she received a second Oscar nomination.

In the 1980s, Christie took on roles in James Ivory's Heat and Dust, Sally Potter's The Gold Diggers, Maria Luisa Bemberg's Miss Mary and Sidney Lumet's Power, among others. In the 1990s, she appeared on screen in the role of Queen Gertrude in Kenneth Branagh's Hamlet and received her third Oscar nomination and the Best Actress Award at the 1997 San Sebastian Film Festival for her performance in Afterglow.

She is soon to star in Hal Hartley's Monster, currently filming in Iceland

Among actresses, Christie holds the record for most films on the British Film Institute poll of The 100 Greatest British Films of All Time - with six: Don't Look Now, Doctor Zhivago, Far From the Madding Crowd, The Go-Between, Darling, and - of course - Billy Liar.

RIALTO PICTURES

Rialto Pictures, a company specializing in the re-release of classic films, was founded in 1997 by Bruce Goldstein. The company's first two releases, co-distributed by Strand Releasing, were Mike Nichols' The Graduate and Jean-Luc Godard's Contempt. In 1998, Goldstein was joined by Adrienne Halpern (co-marketing and acquisitions director) and Mike Thomas (national sales director). Rialto has distinguished itself with a large slate of film classics in excellent prints, including acclaimed restorations of Renoir's Grand Illusion, Carol Reed's The Third Man and Fellini's Nights of Cabiria. Other releases have included Michael Powell's Peeping Tom, Maysles Films' Grey Gardens, and Buñuel's The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie and Diary of a Chambermaid.

This past summer, Rialto had an enormous success with the re-release of Jules Dassin's classic of French film noir, Rififi, which broke the house record for a revival at New York's Film Forum. Rififi is set to open in Los Angeles, Boston, San Francisco, Seattle, and Chicago this fall.

Future Rialto releases include three films by the French film noir and suspense master Jean-Pierre Melville, Le Cercle Rouge, Bob Le Flambeur, and the never-released French resistance thriller L'Armée des Ombres, starring Lino Ventura and Simone Signoret; and three more classics by Luis Buñuel: The Milky Way, Phantom of Liberty, and That Obscure Object of Desire.

In 1999, Rialto received a special "Heritage Award" from the National Society of Film Critics.

FOOTNOTES

1 Keith Waterhouse, Streets Ahead: Life after City Lights (1995, London: Hodder & Stoughton). Most of the quotations from Waterhouse were excerpted from this book.

2 Tommy Steele, a popular British musical star, is best known in this country for his starring role in "Half a Sixpence" - he would certainly have transformed Billy into a cock-eyed optimist.

3 By the time he was cast in Billy, Courtenay was already a sensation - a leading light of a new generation of working-class actors. Courtenay explains in his memoirs (see below) that Finney was actually "lower middle-class," since his father was a bookmaker.

4 Tom Courtenay, Dear Tom (2000, London: Doubleday)

5 Their first film collaboration was actually Brian Forbes' acclaimed debut feature Whistle Down the Wind (1961). Their other movie credits include The Valiant (1962), Pretty Polly (1967), and an uncredited contribution to Hitchcock's Torn Curtain (1966). (Hitchcock campaigned to get them onscreen credit; to the team's relief, The Master was rejected.) Waterhouse & Hall continued to collaborate on TV series, plays and screenplays into the 1990s - in fact, they've never officially broken up, although Hall has moved back to his roots in Leeds.

6 Inserting a personal note in a pressbook is unorthodox, I realize, but let convention be damned: in 1984, I had a ticket to see Rossiter in Loot. He died on a Thursday - my ticket was for the Friday. For some reason, I decided to go anyway and saw a not-very-good understudy (admittedly, he had a hard act to follow - in more ways than one) in place of the brilliant (but dead) Rossiter. The theater lobby was decorated in funeral bunting - I thought this was in acknowledgement of Rossiter's demise, not realizing that Loot, too, was about the funeral business. It made the proceedings even creepier. - Bruce Goldstein.

7 If you look very carefully, Topsy Jane can still be seen in long-shot in some of the Ambrosia scenes - particularly when Billy and Liz wave Peron-like from the balcony.

8 David Shipman, The Great Movie Stars: The International Years (1972, revised 1980; London: Angus & Robertson)

9 Kevin Brownlow, David Lean (1996, New York: St. Martin's Press), page 110.

10 British slang for the narrow houses built to house factory workers.

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