Tom Courtenay delivers a beautiful performance as Billy, an undertaker's clerk with preposterous ambitions and a Walter Mitty-ish fantasy world in John Schlesinger's 1963 British comedy, based on Keith Waterhouse's 1959 novel. The film, part of the now almost forgotten Angry Young Man movement alongside John Osborne's Look Back in Anger and Kingsley Amis's Lucky Jim, follows Billy as he lives at home in Yorkshire with his parents, works a banal job, and takes refuge in reveries where he rules a bizarre Ruritanian land called Ambrosia (possibly named after rice pudding). Billy wants to be a comedy writer, and he is the experienced comedy writer of preposterous situations happening inside his own head. But the film is too quick to surrender his dreams, leaving us wondering if reality ever stood a chance against a good bowl of pudding.