Bartleby

Made largely thanks to Paul Scofield's support, this was much vaunted in its day as an example of what could be done by a British independent cinema. What it actually does is betray Herman Melville's enigmatic story (about a clerk's passive withdrawal from his office responsibilities) by updating it to present-day London and anchoring its mysterious ambiguities in all-too-prosaic realities. And it vividly illustrates the pitfalls of film-making divorced from any real social, political or aesthetic context.