Cinema: Greetings to the Class of '86

Ah there, middle-aged grouches! Bored by the youthquake? Not charmed by the teen flicks that every Cinema Half-a-Dozen seems to have five of? Think that children, including child actors, should be flash-frozen at twelve and thawed out again at 20? Well, help is on the way. Time's winged chariot is rumbling through the shopping mall. Maturity lurks; in a couple of years not one of the kids in The Breakfast Club will be young enough to impersonate a high schooler. Creeping adulthood may require more time to overtake the young male teen-flick actors who, with an exception or two, now look as if a casting director had wandered through a Taco Bell parking lot saying, "Okay, you, you and you." The best of the young women are far more promising. When there is a flash of bright acting, the kind that makes you look for a name in the credits and think that this one is going to be really good, it is likely to be one of them who strikes the fire.

The radiant Molly Ringwald is not the only such coming attraction. Ally Sheedy, who plays the sulky flake to Molly's good girl in The Breakfast Club, is one of a lively and sometimes dazzling handful of others. Sheedy is 23 now, and the leggy, earnest, puppy-cute teenager of WarGames shows up less frequently in her movements than it used to. Her looks have always pivoted at an intriguing point between plain and stunning, a balance that is bad for a movie star but lucky for an actress. She has a pointy nose, a shock of reddish-brown hair and a great, hello-world grin, but there is real beauty in her face. She could play anything from the hero's lovable kid sister to the dark lady of somebody's sonnets, although there have been no sonnets among her eight films so far.

Sheedy was a bright, well-organized and lucky child who danced with the American Ballet Theater in Manhattan when she was six. At twelve she wrote and, with the help of her mother, a literary agent, sold a children's book called She Was Nice to Mice. At 14 she began acting lessons and a few years later moved on her own to Los Angeles. After a short time in the minors (McDonald's and Pizza Hut commercials) she landed a role in a daytime TV special. She is anything but a gaga post-teen now, though she is counted a member of the group of kinda talented, kinda famous young actors somewhat unfairly called the Brat Pack. She needs only a few credits for her bachelor's degree at the University of Southern California. A partly written novel lies fallow. Good sense rules her life, though she has been known to wander off go- cart driving with Brat Packers Emilio Estevez and Judd Nelson (respectively, the jock and the punk of The Breakfast Club, and the waiter and Sheedy's lover of the hanging-out-after-college film St. Elmo's Fire).