Butley is a 1974 American-British drama film directed by Harold Pinter and starring Alan Bates, Jessica Tandy, Richard O'Callaghan, Susan Engel, and Michael Byrne.

The title character, a literature professor and longtime T. S. Eliot scholar with a recently developed interest in Beatrix Potter, is a suicidal alcoholic, who loses his wife and his male lover on the same day.

The Monthly Film Bulletin wrote: "Generically speaking, Ben Butley is an all-too-familiar breed: by Lucky Jim out of Jimmy Porter, he stands, like the hero of Osborne's Inadmissible Evidence, poised with inbred pugnacity on the brink of total disintegration.

His tirade of invective, delivered with lacerating relish by Alan Bates, beautifully modulated by Pinter's sense of timing, and cunningly backlighted by the now obligatory touch of cosy professional outrage ... is often very funny and always easy on the ear.

At any rate, one becomes increasingly aware of the artifice which keeps Ben Butley tied to his office while assorted messengers arrive with the news, in confirmation of his self-diagnosis that "One likes people to be consistent, otherwise one will start coming adrift", that the world is moving on through the changing circumstances of everyone close to him.