A VIEW OF ENGLAND AND THE ENGLISH IN ’28 UP’

One of the most provocative, and best reviewed, imports for this year’s Filmex was “28 Up,” a documentary that looks at the lives of some 7-year-old English schoolchildren and then follows them for 21 years, talking with them at 14 and 21 and last year, when they were 28-year-old parents, teachers, emigres and, in one bleak case, a tramp.

The children were chosen originally by Michael Apted, a young trainee-researcher who had been hired by London’s Granada Television right out of Cambridge University, where he’d read law and history. The director on the first show, which was called “Seven Up” and aired in 1964, was Paul Almond, who later made “Act of the Heart” and other features.

By the time the young people were 14, Apted was himself directing, and he has done the subsequent shows, called “Seven Plus Seven” and “21.” When it came time to do “28 Up,” he was better known as the director of “Coal Miner’s Daughter” (for which he was nominated for an Oscar), “Gorky Park,” “Kipperbang” and the forthcoming “The River Rat.”

“Granada Television was rather left wing,” Apted said the other day, “and the original documentary was conceived as a cautionary tale. The ‘60s were a time of real optimism in England; London was swinging, and there were the Beatles, the Stones, Mary Quant--all of it. It felt like a new day; there was a feeling that after 800 years the class system had been done in by the war.

“Granada wasn’t so sure, and we wanted a cross-section of kids to see if the class system didn’t in fact still exist. Taking the age of 7 was, I suppose, born of the Jesuit idea--give me a child for seven years and I’ll show you the man.”

Apted chose boys and girls from posh boarding schools, a young black from an orphan home, other youngsters from London’s tough East End, from Liverpool and the rural Midlands, 14 in all.

(Remarkably, only two have finally refused further cooperation. One, to Apted’s exasperation, is himself now a documentary maker, with the BBC. The other is a barrister who evidently feels that the celebrity that by now attaches to the “Seven Up” et seq. series would be unhelpful to his career.)

“They were least interesting at 14,” Apted says of the group, “very up-tight and closed-in. I found that all I could do was ask each of them the same set of questions.” Still, the second show, intercut with excerpts from the first, was highly watched.

“They were more interesting at 21, beginning to come out of their shells, starting to express themselves as adults.” There were some surprises: One of the posh girls, who at 7 had been poise itself, her choice of schools set from birth, her whole life seeming to extend serenely before her, at 21 looked a chain-smoking bundle of neuroses.

At 28, they are all fascinating: a dozen human dramas by no means yet concluded, nor with confidently predictable resolutions. But they are a revealing and affecting portrait of England now, a microcosm of social history.

The brightest, perhaps, of the boys emigrated to America and is an assistant professor of nuclear physics at the University of Wisconsin, a walking symbol

of the brain drain that harms Britain as much as the pound’s loss of weight.

A mischievous Cockney, who tried and failed as a jockey, is a cabbie with an emerging career as an actor. One of the posh boys, deeply religious as a child, has in effect renounced class and is teaching immigrant children in the East End.

The black orphan, responding to the loneliness of his childhood, had five children in the seven years between 21 and 28 and presides contentedly over a warm and tidy family life. He is a packing-house worker.

Another couple emigrated to Australia. The posh girl, chain-smoking at 21, found the right man and lives happily in a country village. But Neil, smart, sweet and promising at 7 and beyond, has lost himself, and tramps the countryside, getting by as he can.

Granada was right, philosophically. The class system did not die with the war. It survives, and it colors and shapes the lives of Apted’s people. (“I never think about it,” one of the women says, acknowledging nevertheless that it is there to be thought about.)

“The class system survives, with unequal opportunities for all,” Apted says.

Watching the lives induces a kind of melancholy in an American viewer because the horizons, or the ceilings, seem relatively so low but for the most part so calmly accepted. Only one of the group, who has been a teacher, seems on the evidence to qualify as a latter-day angry young man. Apted reports that he has now quit teaching.

Two of the most energetic, the physicist and a bricklayer, left the country. Apted himself has settled in Pacific Palisades, unable to keep sufficiently challenged and engaged in the British film or television industries.

With hindsight, Apted feels he majored in the extremes in choosing the 7-year-olds. Doing it again, he says, “I would take more from the middle class, and more women.

“The hardest part of the series,” he adds, “has been persuading the people to go on with it. It’s been intrusive, no question about it, and the press attention to them as individuals has not always been kindly, at home or even here.

“Some of them wouldn’t let me show their homes, or talk to their wives or discuss money. But only two of them dropped out altogether, which is astonishing, and even they may come back in; who knows? I think the fact that I came back from America to do ’28 Up’ was persuasive to some of them. We’ve become family in a real sense.”

“28 Up” is more engrossing than any fiction, as suspenseful as any drama. It demonstrates powerfully the potential of television as a repository of social history. Twenty-one years ago already seems a different era--for viewers not less than for Apted’s extended family. As television, it’s an approach that could and ought to be tried in many places.

“I want to go back again when they’re 35,” Apted says; “see what decisions they’ve made, what’s happened to their lives. And there’ll be children, of course. The cycle begins again.”