Pop Art in Movies

John Schlesinger’s Billy Liar (1963), based on the play by Keith Waterhouse and Willis Hall, was the transitional film for the New Wave. Black and white, and shot in Manchester, it highlighted the frustrations of early 1960s youth—a dull job, critical parents, a possessive conventional girlfriend. But Manchester youth Billy Fisher (Tom Courtenay) finds escape from all this in fantasy daydreams. Julie Christie represents the icon of escape. Totally liberated, she is his soulmate, sexually free and secure. At the end, she leaves for London: he cannot bring himself to go.

But the stars and directors who had made their names in New Wave films all forsook the pressures of working-class life in the north of England for the frenetic gaiety of the metropolitan maelstrom—Alan Bates in Nothing But the Best (1964), Rita Tushingham in Smashing Time (1967) and Tom Courtenay in Otley (1968). Julie Christie became the chief symbol of ‘liberated’ womanhood in Swinging London, starring in Darling (1965), Far From the Madding Crowd (1967), Petulia (1968) and The Go-Between (1971). But there continued to be limits to, and ambiguities about, her liberation.

Tom Jones inspired imitations—The Amorous Adventures of Moll Flanders (1965), Lock Up Your Daughters (1969), Sinful Davy (1969) and, in more serious vein, Where’s Jack? (1969)—confirming the view that the eighteenth century was the preferred model for the 1960s. Tony Richardson emphasized this by producing an historical counterpart to Tom Jones in Charge of the Light Brigade (1968), as unsparing an indictment of the nineteenth century as the earlier film had been an uninhibited celebration of the eighteenth. Light Brigade characterized Victorian society as squalid, repressive, brutal and irredeemably class-ridden, implying that it had survived into the twentieth century and was in need of final sweeping away. But the film was also importantly anti-war and anti-military, a direct response to the Vietnam War that dominated the thinking of many of the creative and the young, who saw it as an affront to the new age of freedom, peace and love, as a reminder of great power politics and of archaic imperialism. The nineteenth century was deemed useful only for providing the modish bric-a-brac for the new age, everything from hussars’ jackets to Boer War biscuit tins; Victorian decor was utilized as the high camp and grand kitsch backgrounds for the comic capers of The Wrong Box (1966), The Assassination Bureau (1968) and The Best House in London (1968).

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