John Mortimer

A coming-of-age tale about an illegitimate child who struggles to assert his independence and find his way into a life of art, taken from the autobiography of Franco Zeffirelli. (MGM)

Dustin Hoffman and Mia Farrow meet in a singles bar, sleep together, and spend the next day getting to know each other. (imdb)

A young governess for two children becomes convinced that the house and grounds are haunted. (imdb)

A woman reports that her young daughter is missing, but there seems to be no evidence that she ever existed. (imdb)

Two young men from different backgrounds meet and become friends at Oxford.

A crusade for decency and truth is mounted by a man gone mad (or has he?) in this made-for-TV adaptation of the classic novel by Miguel de Cervantes. (All Movie Guide)

Hard up and with a grudge against insurance companies, Rex Black feigns his death and meets up with his wife and the money in Malaga when things seemed to have quietened down. But when the insurance investigator from the claim also turns up Rex starts a game of cat-and-mouse. (imdb)

British author John Mortimer is best known to television audiences as the creator of Rumpole of the Bailey, the British comedy-drama popular with PBS viewers and starring Leo McKern as an aging barrister fighting the good fight in court but henpecked at home. This 1962 film, Trial and Error, is also based on a Mortimer story and also deals with the decidedly unglamorous lives of people shackled to an imperfect legal system. (Amazon.com)

A Frenchwoman (Rosemary Harris), suspecting her lawyer husband (Rex Harrison) of having an affair, plots to catch him in the act. (imdb)

Shirley Anne Field gives a fiery performance as a young designer on the brink of starting an affair with a married male supervisor (Robert Stephens) at the wallpaper factory where she works. (BFI Filmstore)

This drama by director Anthony Asquith, a noted lynchpin in British cinematic history, may wear too many hats to be identified as either an adventure, a treatise on non-violence, a psychological study, or whatever. It is all of these things as it starts out in the midst of a revolution in a fictional South American country. David Niven is Tom Jordan, the sometimes disagreeable manager of a British plantation. (allrovi.com)

Charming film adaptation of Laurie Lee's classic novel about growing up in an English rural village after the First World War.

Horace Rumpole is an "Old Bailey Hack," one of the underpaid barristers who ply the courtrooms of the Old Bailey, London's criminal court. Rumpole refused to handle most suits and will never prosecute. He always defends. Each of his trials has both a victory and a defeat in them, his clients who are acquitted often angrier than those who are found guilty. There is always at least one and often two subplots.

Touching comedy about a high court judge, now retired to his English countryside home, who resolves to end years of suspicion about his wife's fidelity and the true paternity of their son. (imdb)

In a shabby lodging-house inhabited by a number of faintly ludicrous characters, the young Russian exile Ganin is unexpectedly confronted with his past. (imdb)