John Schlesinger - Billy Liar

Living with his middle class judgmental parents and his ailing maternal grandmother in Yorkshire, and working as a clerk at Shadrack and Duxbury Funeral Furbishers under Mr. Shadrack himself, young adult Billy Fisher often daydreams as a means of escape from what he considers his less than satisfying life, and in the process will tell bald-faced lies to advance his fantasy narrative. While those daydreams are often what he is feeling at any given moment in what he would like to happen in needing to get out of a predicament of his own making, he has a recurring fantasy of being the military ruler of a fictional country called Ambrosia, those scenarios mostly in grand pomp and circumstance for him. The latest lie he is perpetuating is that he has been hired by comedian Danny Boon to be his script writer, entailing a move to London. While he did indeed write to the celebrity in his quest to be a writer of some sort, he only got a noncommittal form letter from Boon's representatives in return (i.e. no one in Boon's entourage actually read what he sent Boon, including Boon himself), he planning on approaching Boon, who coincidentally is in town, to nail down the details of employment. Another one of the predicaments he's gotten himself into is that he is stringing along two different women, Barbara and Rita, who don't know or know of the other, and who, also unknown them, are "sharing" one engagement ring, which Billy has to manage to transfer between them in some manner through more lies. The other thing that neither Barbara or Rita knows is that Billy loves neither of them, getting married which he is feeling pressured to do by his parents. While his actions alienate more and more people, the person who does understand what he is feeling is recently returned free-spirit Liz, an ex-girlfriend who, in feeling much what he has felt about the dead end life in Yorkshire, has left in running from Yorkshire as opposed to running to somewhere or something else, for her the process more important than the outcome.