Billy Liar: my most over-rated film Everyone loves Billy Liar, that classic 60s British picture directed by John Schlesinger, starring Tom Courtenay as Billy himself - the bright, cheeky lad, daft as a brush, lost in his own Walter Mitty fantasies. Except me. I don't love it. It's a nice performance from Courtenay, but I've always felt that this insidiously depressing and defeatist film was massively over-rated. Looking back on the re-release in 2007, I see I gave it a tepid three-star notice, and looked askance on Billy's "loyalty to unhappiness and failure." Watching it again now, my discontent has escalated to a kind of rage. Spoiler alert: this basically boils down to the ending, which is broadly the same in content and in spirit to the 1959 Keith Waterhouse novel on which it is based. Throughout the movie, Billy is frustrated (as unmarried, respectably brought-up young chaps of that period tended to be) and he is moreover mightily fed up with his job in a shop selling "funeral furnishings"; he dreams of escaping to London to become a comedy writer. But in a way he is already the author of comic fantasies - inside his own head. He is forever zooming off into a bizarre and hilarious world of his own. He imagines himself to be the ruler of a made-up world called Ambrosia, commanding a preposterous army. Way out ... Tom Courtenay and Julie Christie in Billy Liar But all of Billy's fantasies are crushed like eggshells when we get right down to it. A beautiful young woman and free-spirit called Liz, played by Julie Christie, encourages him to come with her down to London to make his dreams a reality: they get on the train together, but at the last moment, Billy bottles it. On the pretext of going to get some milk from a platform vending machine, he scuttles off, then pretends to be vexed at missing the train, but is secretly relieved and marches back to his sad little house, the Ambrosian army tramping along visibly behind him. Now, there is nothing more tiresome than people objecting to "miserabilism" and I accept that Billy's fantasies are at least partly an indication of his dysfunction, his anxiety, his very reluctance to go out and face the world. And, of course, there were - and are - plenty of guys like Billy who are trapped. But throughout the film, until we reach that dreary ending, the fantasies had been sold to us as liberating, hilarious episodes - aspirational episodes. They show how Billy could imagine something other than the life he was living. They show he was defiant in spirit, and part of new working-class generation that wasn't going to be kept in its place. Those fantasies were Billy's rocket fuel - weren't they? They were showing he was going places. And after all, Keith Waterhouse was going places. Billy Liar had a strong streak of autobiography. Waterhouse was a bright, imaginative lad from Leeds who worked in an undertaker's after flunking the 11-plus. His imagination, like a boxer's fists, was his way out. And he got out. He became a celebrated author, columnist and playwright. Now, maybe Waterhouse had a few Billy-ish moments of panic and scrambling off trains at the last moment, but he made it in the end. Bye Billy ... Julie Christie in Billy Liar. Photograph: Rex/Everett Collection Not Billy. His failure, meekly accepted, seems to be presented to us as the only plausible and aesthetically satisfying ending. He, and we, pay for our laughs with this slump into disappointment. That final glimpse of the Ambrosian army is clearly supposed to be a little cheery note of fun. Actually, it's awful. When Billy is marching home, and that army appears behind him, and Billy suddenly gets a silly little smirk on his face - I want to scream and reach into the screen and shake him. If this catastrophe was represented to us as a deliberate moment of tragedy, like the ending of The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner, then I could live with it. But it just looks like a failure of nerve, even a kind of dishonesty. I can live without Billy Liar.