If you like documentaries that examine a memorable event and crawl inside the heads of those who participated in it to put things in context and reveal attitudes, Director Kevin Rafferty's film will score a touchdown with you.
It's 1968. Yale is an all-male school with a preppy-elitist reputation. Their football team is an undefeated homogeneous group that is expected to easily hand Harvard its first defeat of the 1968 season--and dash its conference championship hopes--when Yale travels to Cambridge to play the last game of the season. The Harvard team is anything but homogeneous. It has a player recently back from Viet Nam where he survived the battle of Khe Sanh and another who is a member of the radical SDS, protesting the war and picketing campus buildings.
The game is going the way everyone expected: Yale has turned the game into a 22-6 rout by half-time. In the second half a desperate Harvard coach changes quarterbacks. Things don't change much until 42 seconds before the final gun. You already know the final score; it's not much of a spoiler when the title of the film tells you the ending. It's what happens in those last 42 seconds, and the recalled memories of what was going on in the heads of the Harvard and Yale football players forty years ago, that makes the movie worth watching.
These aren't polished actors with scripted lines, they are aging men recalling four decades later what was almost certainly the most memorable game they played in during their football careers. It's interesting—and sometimes amusing--to listen to and watch the reminiscences, the bravado even this long after the game, and how sometimes people remember things the way they wanted them to be rather than the way they were (like when Yale linebacker Mike Bouscaren talks about putting Ray Hornblower out of the game with a tackle). Rafferty captures all of that while inter-weaving scenes of the actual football game. Letting us listen to the former players, Rafferty makes it clear that sometimes in football, as in life, you don't have to score more points to be the winner. The title of the movie, as the film's epilogue discloses, and anyone who has read a review of the film knows, comes from the headline in the Harvard Crimson student newspaper following the game: "Harvard Beats Yale 29-29." It is understandable Yalies might not like this movie. The game was viewed as a loss by anyone that knew anything about college football. And although Rafferty didn't bring it up, even Yale head coach Carmen Cozza was quoted after the game as saying it felt like a loss. It probably still feels that way to Yale fans. To the rest of us though, this is an entertaining and insightful movie.
Incidentally, the University of Florida found itself in a similar situation when it came to Tallahassee to play Florida State University in 1994. Leading its arch-rivals 31-3 going into the final quarter, UF watched helplessly as FSU scored 28 unanswered points to pull out its own 31-31 "win."
It's 1968. Yale is an all-male school with a preppy-elitist reputation. Their football team is an undefeated homogeneous group that is expected to easily hand Harvard its first defeat of the 1968 season--and dash its conference championship hopes--when Yale travels to Cambridge to play the last game of the season. The Harvard team is anything but homogeneous. It has a player recently back from Viet Nam where he survived the battle of Khe Sanh and another who is a member of the radical SDS, protesting the war and picketing campus buildings.
The game is going the way everyone expected: Yale has turned the game into a 22-6 rout by half-time. In the second half a desperate Harvard coach changes quarterbacks. Things don't change much until 42 seconds before the final gun. You already know the final score; it's not much of a spoiler when the title of the film tells you the ending. It's what happens in those last 42 seconds, and the recalled memories of what was going on in the heads of the Harvard and Yale football players forty years ago, that makes the movie worth watching.
These aren't polished actors with scripted lines, they are aging men recalling four decades later what was almost certainly the most memorable game they played in during their football careers. It's interesting—and sometimes amusing--to listen to and watch the reminiscences, the bravado even this long after the game, and how sometimes people remember things the way they wanted them to be rather than the way they were (like when Yale linebacker Mike Bouscaren talks about putting Ray Hornblower out of the game with a tackle). Rafferty captures all of that while inter-weaving scenes of the actual football game. Letting us listen to the former players, Rafferty makes it clear that sometimes in football, as in life, you don't have to score more points to be the winner. The title of the movie, as the film's epilogue discloses, and anyone who has read a review of the film knows, comes from the headline in the Harvard Crimson student newspaper following the game: "Harvard Beats Yale 29-29." It is understandable Yalies might not like this movie. The game was viewed as a loss by anyone that knew anything about college football. And although Rafferty didn't bring it up, even Yale head coach Carmen Cozza was quoted after the game as saying it felt like a loss. It probably still feels that way to Yale fans. To the rest of us though, this is an entertaining and insightful movie.
Incidentally, the University of Florida found itself in a similar situation when it came to Tallahassee to play Florida State University in 1994. Leading its arch-rivals 31-3 going into the final quarter, UF watched helplessly as FSU scored 28 unanswered points to pull out its own 31-31 "win."
