The camera moves from facade to dull facade, over endless piles of suburban flats (background music is from “Housewife’s Choice”). By the time it has found Billy Fisher, still in bed and ceaselessly con-juring fantasies of escape, you ask yourself, Now that the English have worked themselves into this stultifying security, how in the world can they get out? Billy, a victim and perhaps a symptom of the crowded world, never does get out, neither in Keith Water'-house’s novel (Billy Liar), nor in Iohn Schlesinger’s film version of the book. In Iubb, which once again explores the claustrophobic dilemma of the 19607s, Waterhouse’s hero has even less chance of surviving; we watch him slowly strangle, page by page. These two characters, besides David Storey’s Arthur Machin, Iohn Fowles’ Col-lector, Alan Sillitoe’s Arthur Seaton, most of dramatist Harold Pinter’s people—and to suggest a few more, film protagonists created by Schlesinger, Ioseph Losey and Karel Reisz—form not only a substantial group of frozen types but a new comic naturalism opposed to the doctrine of movement put forward in the early fifties. The whole idea of movement, symbolized by the Bike and the Road, meant something for a time: it did for me until I saw the