Please note that my post above was written in 2002. At that time, the early material was unavailable. That has changed, thankfully.
I got to see 49 Up at last year’s Seattle film festival. It was the straight-from-British-TV version, before being re-edited into feature format. Had television breaks and everything.
I don’t want to give anything away, but I will say, despite looking forward to this latest episode in the series for many years (note again the date of my post above), despite enormous anticipation, I wasn’t disappointed. Many of the people have made surprising turns in their lives; and many of them are equally surprising for their lack of turns. Further, there’s a new quality of “looking back on life” that wasn’t really present in the early installments. Two of the men, in fact, who hadn’t seen each other since they were in the first film, meet on a vacation/visit and spend a bunch of time catching up.
Highly recommended. But please, see at least a couple of the previous ones before diving into this one. The time-lapse quality of the real-life narrative is one of the magical things about the films.
I’m pleased to see that all the previous episodes are available on DVD (not locally, alas) so I might watch all of them again before 49 Up is released.
I apologise again for resurrecting this thread. Thinking on it later, I should probably have started a new thread.
Actually, given the theme of the films, it’s rather appropriate to hang the new part of the discussion directly from the bottom of the available history, don’t you think?
If you go to the Wikipedia link upthread, you can read that there have been a few attempts to do this in other countries by other directors, including here in the US.
