Michael Apted Movies

The British documentary Seven Up originated in 1963 as a 31-minute episode of the highly acclaimed Granada Television series World in Action. Acting upon the venerable Jesuit edict "Give me a child until he is seven, and I will give you the man," director Paul Almond and his young team of assistants randomly selected a group "typical" seven-year-old British children from the ranks of the private-school system. In various locations and situations, the filmmakers interviewed the kids about their backgrounds, their present lives, and their hopes and dreams for the future. Of the interviewees -- ten boys (one of them black), four girls -- six were drawn from the financially strapped working class, four from the privileged upper class, and four from what was vaguely defined as British middle class. Not surprisingly, the upper-class youngters are already reading all the "right" newspapers, carefully plotting out their adult careers, and generally behaving in a patronizing manner to their interviewers. Of the working-class youngsters, East Ender Tony seems to have the clearest vision of what he wanted to do with his life; he intends to be a professional jockey, and is eager and willing to work up the ranks in pursuit of that goal. Viewers who tuned in back in 1963 were most affected by the story of middle-class youngsters Nick, Bruce, and especially Neil, a lonely, sickly looking Liverpudlian lad who aspires to be a tour-bus driver. Intended as a one-shot project, Seven Up took on a life of its own when one of Paul Almond's assistants, 22-year-old Michael Apted, thought it would be fascinating to keep tabs on the 14 children and update their stories at seven-year intervals. With this in mind, Apted -- becoming a full-fledged director himself -- rounded up the kids in 1970 for a follow-up TV documentary, Seven Plus Seven. Thus began what amount to a lifelong creative mission for Michael Apted, yielding such fascinating, and, at times, heartrending filmed studies as 21 Up (1977), 28 Up (1984), 35 Up (1991), and 42 Up (1998). ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

Set in England during WWII, this drama, also known as Soldiers in Skirts, stars Glenda Jackson as Alice, a bitter woman whose husband is captured and held as a Japanese prisoner of war. When a wandering soldier, Barton (Brian Deacon), comes by her farm, she invites him in for tea. They fall in love. In order to remain in the town with Alice and escape the military police who are looking for deserters, Barton disguises himself as a woman. A sergeant (Oliver Reed), who commands a tank unit, comes to town and makes advances toward Barton, whom he thinks is a woman. ~ Michael Betzold, All Movie Guide

Originally made for Canadian television, this romantic and supernatural tale chronicles the adventures of a comely young woman who becomes the governess at a proper English estate and finds herself avoiding the romantic advances of her employer and his son. Things become very complex when she is possessed by the house ghost. ~ Sandra Brennan, All Movie Guide

This Michael Apted-directed crime melodrama features Stacy Keach as Jim Naboth, a Scotland Yard cop on the skids, suffering from depression and alcoholism. He is summoned by Foreman (Edward Fox), a British security expert whose wife Jill (Carol White) and daughter are being held hostages by kidnappers until Foreman pays the crooks a million-dollar-plus ransom. Jim has to marshal his forces and regain his clarity to save Foreman's family. The pressure is even more intense for Jim, since Foreman's wife, Jill also happens to be his former spouse. ~ Paul Brenner, All Movie Guide

What happened when best-selling mystery novelist Agatha Christie disappeared for 11 days back in 1926? The British Agatha "answers" that question. Vanessa Redgrave is cast as Ms. Christie, who vanished from her home not long after her husband (Timothy Dalton) informed her that he was leaving her. Nearly two weeks later, after being the subject of a nationwide search, Christie showed up none the worse for wear at a health spa in Yorkshire, insisting that she could remember nothing of her experiences during her disappearance. According to scriptwriters Kathleen Tynan and Arthur Hopcraft, Christie was located before her return by American reporter Wally Stanton (an uncomfortable-looking Dustin Hoffman), after enjoying a brief romantic fling with the authoress. The journalist decided to keep his discovery a secret. Another plot wrinkle concerns Christie's plan for revenge against her errant husband -- a scheme with all the earmarks of a Miss Marple or Poirot whodunit. Agatha represented former TV director Michael Apted's matriculation to A-pictures with major stars; he fared better with his subsequent endeavor, Coal Miner's Daughter (1980). ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

In this provocative British drama, a young Yorkshire woman discovers a radioactive leak at the nuclear power plant where she works. At first, her lover encourages her make public her find, but when the resulting pressure gets too strong, he leaves her to fight alone. Despite her pleas and insistence, no one believes her story. The frustration eventually causes the crusading woman to go insane. ~ Sandra Brennan, All Movie Guide

The romantic hurdles experienced by the teen set at a British school are juxtaposed with the same type of difficulties experienced by their elders in this pat, adolescent view of life and love by director Michael Apted for a British TV series called First Love. The English teacher (Alison Steadman) is in love with the gardener (Garry Cooper) and has her own problems to handle. Young Alan (John Albasiny) is in love with Ann (Abigail Cruttenden) and is hyperventilating over the fact that he will have to kiss her in the school play, in front of everyone. Alan and his best buddies are more or less focused on the nature of sex and how to get it and what to do from there, while Alan's hero the gardener may turn out to have feet of clay. In this standard TV fare, the young actors are not quite at the same par as the adults, making their antics less engaging than otherwise. ~ Eleanor Mannikka, All Movie Guide

While working on the BBC television documentary series The World in Action in 1963, director Michael Apted, in collaboration with Paul Almond, produced a feature-length study of 14 seven-year-old Britons. Titled 7 Up, the film drew its on-camera personnel from every part of the social strata. Apted and Almond invited the kids to expound extemporaneously upon their feelings, desires, and aspirations. Seven years later, the same 14 people were rounded up for Seven Times Seven, which brought their individual histories up to date. And so it went until 1991, with Apted, now working solo, updating his original 1963 documentary every seven years. In 1984, all existing chapters were bundled together into the British miniseries 28 Up. By far, the best of the updates, as well as the most optimistic, 28 Up was later boiled down to a 113-minute feature film. In both its series and featurized form, 28 Up is a fascinating social document; those who like cushioning themselves against disillusionment, however, are advised to bypass 35 Up (1991), wherein the 14 middle-aged subjects are a lot more fearful about their future than they'd even been before. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

Tommy Lee Jones plays the title character in The River Rat. Released from prison after 13 years, Jones heads south to meet his hoydenish daughter Martha Plimpton for the first time. The father-daughter relationship flounders until Jones takes the girl on a long, bonding raft trip on the river. Both Jones and Plimpton become fugitives from justice when they run afoul of crooked parole-officer Brian Dennehy. Before the film's allotted 93 minutes have passed, Plimpton has proven time and again to be truly her father's daughter. It's a toss-up as to which is more enjoyable in River Rat, the film itself or the wall-to-wall musical score by Mike Post. Screenwriter Thomas Rickman was underwritten for his directorial debut by Robert Redford's Sundance Institute. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

Director John Landis helmed this Cold War farce starring Dan Aykroyd and Chevy Chase as Austin Millbarge and Emmett Fitz-Hume -- two loser misfits who dwell in the lower ranks of the Central Intelligence Agency. Convinced despite much evidence to the contrary that they're prime secret agent material, both men keep taking service exams in an effort to win promotion. Caught cheating on their latest round of tests, Austin and Emmett expect to be fired but are instead made full field agents and ushered into intense training. Little do they know that it's all a ruse and that they're about to be dumped in Pakistan to throw Russian spies off the scent of two real agents with an important clandestine assignment. A spoof of the "road" pictures popularized by Bing Crosby and Bob Hope, the film features a cameo by the latter as his golf-playing self. ~ Karl Williams, All Movie Guide

Gorillas in the Mist is based on the autobiographical 1983 book by naturalist Dian Fossey. Before the book could be brought before the cameras, Fossey had been mysteriously killed; her death provides a logical, if somewhat ghoulish climax to the film. A Kentucky girl, Fossey (Sigourney Weaver) is inspired by famed anthropologist Louis Leakey (Ian Cuthbertson) to devote her life to the study of primates. Travelling into deepest Africa, Fossey becomes fascinated with the lives and habits of the rare mountain gorillas of the Ugandan wilderness. Studying them at close quarters, Fossey develops a means of communicating with the gorillas, and in so doing becomes obsessed with the beasts' well-being. She is so devoted to "her" mountain that she loses the opportunity for a romance with a National Geographic photographer (Bryan Brown). Appalled by the poaching of the gorillas for their skins, Fossey complains to the Ugandan government, which dismisses her by explaining that poaching is the only means by which some of the Ugandan natives can themselves survive. She refuses to accept this, and becomes a militant animal-rights activist, burning down the poachers' villages and even staging a mock execution of one of the offenders. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

A pair of lawyers must balance their professional principles (such as they are) against family loyalties in this courtroom drama. Jedediah Ward (Gene Hackman) is a leftist lawyer who has based his career on helping people avoid being taken for a ride by the rich and powerful; he's pursued principle at the expense of profit, though he has a bad habit of not following up on his clients after their cases are settled. Jed's daughter, Maggie (Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio), has had a bad relationship with her father ever since she discovered that he was cheating on her mother, and while she also has made a career in law, she has taken a very different professional route by working for a high-powered corporate law firm and has adopted a conservative political agenda. Jed is hired to help field a lawsuit against a major auto manufacturer whose station wagons have a dangerous propensity to explode on impact, but while his research indicates he has an all but airtight case against them, the case becomes more complicated for him when he discovers that Maggie is representing the firm he's suing. ~ Mark Deming, All Movie Guide

Actor Robert De Niro started a production company to make films just like this one: stories which were unpopular with the establishment and which are unlikely to make a big splash at the box-office. Even so, this is a first-class production, and the filmmakers were the first to receive permission to film on the Pine Ridge (Sioux) Reservation in South Dakota, likely due to director Michael Apted's having previously made an accurate and sensitive documentary about Indian political prisoner Leonard Peltier's case, Incident at Oglala. The film did exactly as well as expected at the box-office but has since assumed greater importance as one of the tiny number of "mainstream" movies which faithfully and respectfully illuminate Native American issues. In the story, loosely based on the earlier documentary, Ray Levoi (Val Kilmer) is an ambitious up-and-coming FBI agent in the 1970s with great career prospects. The one thing he will not tolerate is any reference to his half-Indian heritage. As far as he is concerned, his loyalties and culture identify him with the government and his white mother. He is extremely touchy about anything to do with his father, who was an alcoholic full-blooded Sioux. However, the FBI wants to take advantage of his half-Indian blood to mend fences in a politically sensitive murder investigation, and it sends him exactly where he doesn't want to go. Further, he is widely advertised as being Indian, though he knows virtually nothing about his heritage and has renounced it to the best of his ability. Once on the reservation, he becomes deeply involved in a truly messy state of affairs and is drawn into situations where he is forced to confront his background, native spirituality, and the duplicity of the government and its allies within the tribe. Despite his consistent prickliness about his heritage, his heart is in the right place, and the reservation's sheriff (Graham Greene) and a wise spiritual elder (Chief Ted Thin Elk) patiently lead their unwilling FBI pupil on a soul-wrenching wild goose chase which paradoxically takes him straight to the heart of the matter. ~ Clarke Fountain, All Movie Guide