Cinema: Growing Up, Old and Fat

From Britain, Hollywood and Germany, parables for 1986

28 UP

Every seven years they become British TV stars: "Suzi, the posh girl," and "Tony, the tearaway jockey boy," and poor dear Neil, and the rest of a dozen or so children who have grown up, or at least older, playing themselves in a real-life soap opera. They were selected in 1963 for a TV documentary called 7 Up and have sat for state-of-their-lives portraits in 1970, 1977 and 1984, all supervised by Michael Apted (director of Coal Miner's Daughter and Gorky Park). The latest installment, 28 Up, includes generous excerpts from the three previous reports. Flipping through the dozen...

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