Before going into this review, it is only fair of this writer to point out that he cares not one whit about, and has not a scintilla of interest in football. Having said that, we can also say, without equivocation, that Kevin Rafferty's Harvard Beats Yale 29-29 is a dazzling, engrossing, must-see piece of film all about...football. Except that it's also about a lot more.
For background, the November 23, 1968 matchup between the two undefeated Ivy League teams marked the first time the rivals had met undefeated in more than six decades. It wasn't a championship game, or played for any trophy of any sort. It was just an ordinary game that came to be remembered for decades after, owing to the rivalry between the two schools and because of the way it ended; Harvard, the decided underdog in almost everyone's estimation, battled back from a 16-point deficit to end the game in a tie, all in the final three and a half minutes of play. Rafferty has transcended his subject, however, with a movie that intercuts very skillfully between actual (and very grainy, but fully adequate) footage of the game, shot and preserved by the local television station, and interviews with the surviving participants (all of the key players except for future pro-ball star Calvin Hill, who apparently would not participate, are represented).
What one gets is a fascinating and endlessly engrossing look at a football game that did, indeed, become about a dozen times more exciting than anyone could have expected. But also a look back, in the course of examining the game and its participants, at where one corner of the country was in 1968: one of the key players, then age 24, had just returned to college after serving in the Marines in Vietnam, including being part the siege of Khe Sanh; and these men (now all in their late fifties) were in the prime of their youth. It turns into a celebration of youth, and of the high point in the lives of many of the players (one man -- a Harvard player, of course -- says, in all seriousness, that the final three minutes of the game were better than sex, and then has to point out, in answer to Rafferty's question, that no, he was not a virgin at the time that he first felt that about the game, as it was unfolding). It's very touching watching these men relive and, for a few seconds or minutes, recapture that youth. Most moving of all is Frederick R. "Fritz" Reed, the Harvard tackle (number 75), who played a key role at a critical moment, recovering a loose ball and running it 23 yards through a flabbergasted Yale defense. He recalls it here with great modesty but enthusiasm, in a film account made shortly before his death in 2007.
Rafferty, whose best-known credit is The Atomic Cafe, has achieved something much more impressive with this film. This isn't a snarky if insightful look at official folly, but a close and moving, exhilarating look at a high point in many people's young lives, and also at the world they occupied -- and to make it clear, Harvard and Yale at the time were both male-only institutions, so women are only talked about, never seen, except as part of the huge stadium crowd. Women, however, and the war and morality all figure in to what we see and hear (the arrival of birth control pills in the culture had a profound indirect effect on these men's lives). Most times this up close and personal look is reassuring, though there is at least one Yale player whose sense of right and wrong is so problematic that one would hesitate to put him into a position of trust. Peripheral participants include Garry Trudeau, whose work -- then running in the campus newspaper as Bull Tales, the predecessor to Doonesbury -- is seen, plus Al Gore and George W. Bush, who are talked about, the former by his college roommate, Tommy Lee Jones, who was on the Harvard team.
And there is one odd, almost incidental cinematic moment that speaks volumes about the perspective of this game and its surrounding events, and also might have delighted Stanley Kubrick. It comes up in those final minutes, when the band strikes up the opening of Richard Strauss' Also Sprach Zarathustra -- what would have been the odds that, without 2001: A Space Odyssey in release at the time, the band would have played the Strauss piece at a critical point in the game? And that referential moment raises another point -- as that game was being played, NASA was frantically preparing the Apollo 8 lunar orbital mission for launch just four weeks later; the world was preparing to orbit the first manned mission around the moon; the Vietnam War was still raging; and the 1968 political season, all but destroyed by assassinations and riot over the previous year, had just ended three weeks before with the very bitter Nixon-Humphrey-Wallace race. But for the players and the people in the stands, all of that was pushed into the background, for the sake of football. Rafferty has captured this phenomenon and the moments surrounding it, in about as neat and fine a film as you could make -- one that, for this non-football-loving reviewer, has proved to be not only a must-see, or a must-see-twice, but a must-see-thrice.