Billy Liar ending explained: why he gets off the London train for milk and lets Liz leave without him
Sixty-odd years on, British cinema has still never topped it for understated devastation: a young man faffing about at a milk machine while his whole future pulls out of the station.
The ending of Billy Liar is one of the great acts of bottling it in all of cinema. Billy Fisher — undertaker's clerk, compulsive fantasist, self-appointed ruler of the imaginary nation of Ambrosia — finally has everything he claims to want. Julie Christie's Liz, the only person in his grim northern town who operates on his frequency, is on the midnight train to London and has all but proposed they go together. He's on the train. Suitcase stowed. And then he hops off to buy two cartons of milk from the platform vending machine) — and dawdles, visibly, deliberately, until the whistle goes and the train pulls out with Liz at the window.
The milk is not the point. The milk has never been the point.
Why the milk, then
Billy needs an alibi he can live with, and the film is scrupulous about showing you the machinery:
- A decision disguised as an accident. He doesn't refuse London; he simply arranges to miss it. Nobody can call him a coward over a mishap with a vending machine — least of all himself.
- Fantasy only works as a spare room. In London, Billy would have to actually write his scripts, actually be somebody. Ambrosia cannot survive contact with an audition.
- Liz is the terrifying one. His other girlfriends demand things Billy can dodge. Liz asks for nothing except that he come — she's the one fantasy that turned real and held its hand out, and that is precisely what he cannot survive.
- The day has given him cover. His grandmother has died that evening; staying can be dressed up as duty rather than fright.
So he walks the dark road home — and John Schlesinger grants him his consolation prize: the marching army of Ambrosia falls in behind him, imaginary banners flying, and Billy strides through his front door as his invented nation's anthem swells. He has chosen to be emperor of nowhere over being a nobody somewhere real.
The shot that ended one Britain and started another
The critic Philip French called the sequence a pivotal moment in British cinema), and the pivot has a face: Christie, whose Liz — all swinging bag and unbothered stride — earned a BAFTA nomination and minted her as a star overnight.
Liz walking away with the train is, in retrospect, the Sixties leaving without the North. Two years later Schlesinger and Christie made Darling, about the London she got off at — and won her the Oscar. Billy, one assumes, read about it over breakfast.
Tom Courtenay, for his part, plays the final walk home not as tragedy but as something worse: relief.
Read more: Barry Lyndon's true story: Thackeray got it from a friend in Paris whose grandmother had lived it