63 Up · The Up Series
2019-06-04 · Michael Apted · 150 min
Tony Walker
The cab trade that had carried him since 21 was being upended by Uber, and Spain had been scaled back. Tony's sharpest moment was turning the camera on Apted, demanding an accounting for the prison prediction — and getting one.
Neil Hughes
63 Up showed Neil going through the end of a marriage while still holding office and preaching. The verdict he gave on himself was harsh, and it sat uneasily beside a decade of elected service.
Bruce Balden
Bruce at 63 offered little drama and much continuity: the same school, the same marriage, the same decency. Reviewers singled him out as the participant who had most fully become the child he was.
Nick Hitchon
The film's hardest interview: a newly diagnosed cancer patient, recently bereaved, speaking with characteristic honesty about a shortened horizon. He was nonetheless still working and still grateful for his marriage.
Andrew Brackfield
Just out of a long career at Linklaters and openly regretful about the hours it took from his family. The confident seven-year-old had become a softer, more reflective man.
John Brisby
Still practising at the top of the Chancery Bar and still devoted to Bulgaria, he spoke about the series with weary honesty — a burden he had learned to tolerate and even credit.
Jackie Bassett
Frailer and bereaved, Jackie is still the participant most willing to argue with the film about itself, and 63 Up finally lets Apted answer her. Her hopes have shifted to the next generation — a granddaughter she is determined will go to university.
Lynn Johnson · remembered (after their death)
Lynn is present in 63 Up only through the people she left behind. Apted handles the series' first death by turning to legacy — Russ and the daughters describe a woman whose community reach they had not fully grasped while she lived.
Sue Davis (later Sue Sullivan; Sue Fitzgerald from 2020)
The bubbliest participant at 63 is looking towards retirement with mild dread and a full life behind her. Sue's segment is the series' picture of an ordinary working-class woman who did fine.
Paul Kligerman
At 63 Paul was still the retirement-village handyman, married to Susan for over forty years and surrounded by grandchildren. The instalment's emotional centre for him was Symon's first visit to Australia: two boys from the same children's home, now grandfathers, talking about the confidence they never had and the families they built anyway. Michael Apted, filming what would be his last instalment, gave the reunion pride of place.
Symon Basterfield
At 63 Symon was a warehouse worker, foster father and grandfather of ten whose fractured first family was slowly knitting back together. The film flew him and Vienetta to Australia to see Paul, and the two old dormitory-mates compared the confidence they had never had with the families they had built anyway. Symon, once the boy who would 'just walk around', told Apted he was living proof that you have to push yourself and keep going.
Peter Davies
At 63 Peter was the series' historian, using his own life to measure how far Britain had come since 1964 and judging it more tolerant and less prejudiced, though not uncritically. He was still playing with The Good Intentions after the loss of a bandmate and increasingly describing himself as a writer. He talked more in this film than in his brief 56 Up return, at ease with the project he had once fled.