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Trailer for "49 Up"

The year in which the series of remarkable films that have been appearing at seven-year intervals began, 1964, is relevant to what this cinematic project portrays. When the initial installment, 7 Up, made its debut as a British television documentary, it was intended as the first of a number of movies examining the lives of a group of children from very different backgrounds, most in and around London.

Now we have Michael Apted’s 49 Up and the results of this long, intermittent chronicle may be at least somewhat surprising, or modestly revelatory, even for those who are familiar with the previous installments. (If this is to be the last of the series—and it has a little of the feel of a final chapter—it will have ended at an appropriate number.) It has also become obvious how important the year it started was to what happened to its subjects.

The children interviewed in 7 Up were born in 1957, near the end of one era and the advent of another that would severely challenge and alter the assumptions, precepts and practices that had guided British life decade upon decade. When they were born, one could still refer to an existing, if rapidly diminishing, British Empire; Sir Winston Churchill, who vainly strove to maintain that empire, was only two years out of office.

One of the fascinations of the Up series (recently issued as a DVD box set) is that the personal and social changes the participants have experienced are like those Americans have known. Simon, the only person of color among the 12 remaining participants (one boy dropped out 28 years ago), alluded to these upheavals when he noted, at age 21, that his illegitimate birth, once stigmatizing, was already of much less moment to most people.

Each of the seven films has included black and white shots of the seven-year-olds, scrambling and cavorting in a playground as an announcer informs us of the kids’ “startlingly different backgrounds” and portentously invokes an old, ominous Jesuit maxim: “Give me the child until he is seven, and I will show you the man.”

Given the varied, and sometimes very adverse circumstances of the children, one might easily have come to expect some outcomes different and sadder for some of them than for others. 49 Up finds these subjects in middle age, all of them having reached states of often hard-earned satisfaction, if not deep contentment.

Simon and Paul, both from broken homes and with single parents, spent time in the same home for boys. Both have nevertheless achieved reasonably stable, moderately rewarding lives. Simon and his wife (his second) have taken in foster children, at least partly in consequence of his ragged origins.

Three working-class East End girls have worked their ways through broken marriages and risky situations to more satisfying places in life.

The two most privileged (by a wide margin) of the kids have ended up about where they aimed themselves and where society intended them to be. After Oxford, they’re both wealthy lawyers. (One, a bit of a Tory prat named John, nevertheless offers the rueful but incisive observation that the Up movies were reality TV before “reality” was a genre.)

The happy surprises are to be found among the least favored. The series doesn’t really suggest that class no longer matters in the United Kingdom, or elsewhere in Capitalism, but rather that its cruelest impositions have abated or disappeared. The movies are, therefore, an unusually revealing sociological narrative.

But their attraction for us isn’t mostly based on glimpses of class relations. They compose a compelling multi-character drama, perhaps like a nonfiction version of a long Trollope or Galsworthy novel. These people have come to mean something to many who have followed the films, or seen them years after their first appearances.

The story of Neil, a boy from a “good” family who once aspired to an Oxford education and an important career, only to find himself a vagrant at twenty-eight, unable to cope with life and its disappointments, would be a poignantly involving case study in itself. And even he has found some measure of happiness, unconventional as it is, as well as self-respect.

Apted, who was only an assistant director on 7 Up and 14 Up, makes a calmly sympathetic off-camera interviewer, but a politely determined one. (Jackie, one of the East Enders, bridles at his questions at one point.) The others are more congenial, if still a little uncomfortable, about his visits and the essentially intrusive nature of the project.

Calling something “unique” has long since become a vapid merchandising ploy, but this series of valuable films is truly unique in movie history.