source: Harvard Beats Yale 29-29

"Harvard Beats Yale 29-29" is a critically acclaimed film that bored me to tears. It's a shame, as this game that the film is about is among the most exciting ever played and SHOULD have been a wonderful topic. But the film is made in the most pedestrian manner--with low energy interviews, too many clips of the game itself and no incidental music or any qualities that make it appear cinematic or well polished. Aside from the novelty of seeing Tommy Lee Jones (he played for Harvard on this team), I found that the film never interested me. Now this is NOT because I hate sports documentaries--I love them. In fact the "30 For 30" series from ESPN is brilliant and highly engaging. But this documentary fails for me because it's so lethargic.

The astonishing thing about this documentary isn't the excitement and the drama. The football game is presented brilliantly, the key plays are shown in riveting detail and you really feel like you're down on the field with the players right until the final gun. But the astonishing thing is how much you really learn about Harvard and Yale and why they have the reputation of being the very best of the best colleges in America. All the interviews in this movie are interesting, but the one that shocked me was when this big, tough, Harvard linebacker broke down and started crying, forty years after the game! And not because he muffed a block or a tackle, either. "I can't believe Harvard would take a chance on a kid like me," he said. That line really stuck with me long after I left the theater. You see, I went to Columbia, which is also part of the Ivy League. But the whole time I was there in the mid-eighties, I had a sense that there was something missing. It wasn't till I saw this movie that I understood what it was. The thing about Harvard and Yale isn't that they only admit the richest kids, or the smartest kids. The thing is that once you're admitted you're really someone. You're a part of something. And I suspect it's not just the stars on the football teams who feel that way. When I was at Columbia it was just the opposite. It was a campus full of strangers located in the most impersonal urban landscape imaginable. I don't remember anyone crying over how lucky they were to be there. When my roommate dropped out halfway through the freshman year, no one on the faculty or in the administration begged him to stay. No one asked me why I didn't do more to help him, either. It wasn't until years later I began to ask myself that question. And I've begun to suspect that the answer lies largely in the way Columbia treated all its undergraduates like cattle. They didn't expect champions, and they didn't get them either. To be sure, there were some star athletes on campus, and they got plenty of fawning remarks and plenty of special attention from the faculty. But it was because they were part of a special elite, not because they really mattered as individuals. None of us really mattered as individuals. That's why Columbia is strictly third rate compared to Harvard and Yale. I always thought it was because Yale and Harvard had richer kids, smarter kids, tougher kids. Really it's just because Harvard and Yale treat their students like human beings, and not like cattle. And that's what I learned from watching Harvard "beat" Yale.

..............and if he/she did they sure didn't bother to try to understand it or what the movie had to say! This is one of the best movies of the year so far. It has twists and ironies that make us think about what games and human interplay have to teach us as well as the participants in the event. Some of the players came in not knowing what to expect, some came in sure they would win and others in the course of the game refused to give up on the game, themselves and their teammates! One of the players throughout the movie was presented in a way that we as viewers thought we would wind up intensely disliking him but in the end he wound up learning so much from this game that it helped him become the person he is today - in his own words, a "better person". This forced the viewers of the film to learn something about themselves as well. The movie has humor, pain, arrogance, humility and a full range of human emotions as well as nuttiness and thrills. Pegasus3 missed so much about this movie that it does appear they didn't really see it. E.g., they say that it was a close game?? Well gee, it WAS A TIE GAME...how much closer could it be?? And the player talking about injuring another player (who was his friend BTW)... he actually thought he HAD injured him in the game to get him out of the game BUT as we see in the footage on the play where he was sure he had accomplished this he was nowhere near the play!! What irony! And the fact that P3 didn't even understand the title....the most ironic of all. He asked if he missed something? Well only the entire point of the movie - that Harvard "won" the game simply by tying the score in the end when they weren't even expected to come close! They won by doing so much better than they were expected to do. Contrary to the writers comment the title DID sum up the movie! All in all - a well-made, interesting and ultimately great movie. The players themselves summed it up best - it was only a game but what a game and what FUN it was to play in it. GO SEE IT!

I don't know how the person in front of me is writing a bad review on this. This movie was hilarious and entertaining. I'm a football lover and even i wasn't excited about seeing this, until i saw how amazingly entertaining all of the characters are. You really get to see inside the minds of these players, and what it was like to be part of such a great game. The players are all very entertaining, (except Tommy Lee Jones) and some of them you love, some of them you hate. Great movie, great story, a great time. These players are funny, and quick to make fun of themselves and each other. I don't know how anyone could not love it. Maybe not great for girls, but anyone else is going to love it.

Kevin Rafferty is an acclaimed documentary filmmaker. He created this remarkable homage to the 1968 Harvard-Yale game by interviewing nearly all the players and key participants as well as celebrities who knew the players at the time. The result is a terrific, entertaining and enlightening film that is at once joyous and celebratory. A remarkable accomplishment. Also, recaptures a far more innocent time of our past. Despite the political upheavals of the late 1960s, life was far simpler in 1968 and this, too, is fully captured in this film. Celebrity notes; Tommy Lee Jones was a linebacker for Harvard in the 1968 season; Meryl Streep dated one of the Yale players; and there are more surprises in the film. A great film. Brian Dowling, Yale's QB in 1968, Doonesbury's BD, was known at Yale as "God." So God is in this film too....

This was about one of the most boring documentaries I can recall ever seeing. Despite being a Yale Grad during that vintage decade, I could barely muster enough interest to watch the entire film. I had hoped for more than a bunch of aging males reveling in their past football exploits. To be sure, the game was dramatic and close, quite obviously by the final score. Despite an occasional foray into other topical issues of the era, the seemingly endless mechanics recounted by team members from both sides left one wishing for more depth and intelligent commentary by those having attended such august universities. And to see one of the Yale team gloating over his attempts to injure a key player to get him out of the game only gave this viewer a sour taste in his mouth rather than any admiration for such macho antics. In addition, one of the key celebrity participants looked like he had come off a month long drunk, pitching comments like some sort of arrogant poseur. The final puzzle of the film was the title. Am I missing something? A tie is a tie. Games are all about points and you're not a winner unless you score more points than your opponent. Notwithstanding some cutesy philosophical point that the director Kevin Rafferty might be trying to make, the title seems to fall flat as any kind of sophisticated summation of the movie's content.

Director Kevin Rafferty's Documentary takes a look back at the most legendary college football game in Ivy League history. Released to coincide with the 40th Anniversary of the match, Rafferty takes a fairly straightforward approach assembling a couple dozen of the players in that game, including the most famous, Oscar winning actor Tommy Lee Jones (Harvard, Offensive Guard). The best surviving footage of the game is a kinescope from a Boston TV station (I didn't know that was still being done that late in the 60s!) and it is generously excerpted here. Since it involves two of the most prestigious schools in the nation, many of the interviewees here went on to successful careers as lawyers, businessmen and other professionals. Still, it's the subtext of the entire Doc that those three hours on a football field near the Cambridge campus still could mean so much to them four decades on. Other than Jones, there are cameos (via recollections and some vintage photos) of Meryl Streep (an old girlfriend of one of the players) and both Presidential Candidates in 2000, Al Gore (Harvard; roommate of Jones) and George Bush Jr. (Yale). Other social issues including the Vietnam War and the women's movement are touched upon, if fairly lightly. HARVARD BEATS YALE 29-29 can be enjoyed just as a sports movie (and it was quite the game), but, there is more at stake here than mere athletics. Director Rafferty (who went to Harvard) recently passed on. In addition to this doc he created other memorable films including ATOMIC CAFE (1982) and BLOOD IN THE FACE (1991; where he mentored a young Michael Moore).

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."

Kevin Rafferty's ("The Atomic Cafe") new documentary shows us the historical match between Yale's and Harvard's undefeated football teams, in Cambridge, back in November 1968. The Vietnam War was roaring, birth control was a brand new wonder, and these 20 year-olds were meant to give their best in the greatest match of their lives. Through contemporary interviews with the players (including Harvard graduate and Oscar-winning actor Tommy Lee Jones), now forty years older and wiser, plus the actual game's footage with instant replay, we're transported to that exhilarating moment in time - the game and the era. Rafferty's film's best qualities - nostalgia, portrayal of an era, love of the game - should be praised; yet, it didn't always work for me. Don't get me wrong, it's a fine documentary, and I'm personally fascinated by the 1960's (it's not because I wasn't even born then that I wouldn't be interested in it!), but the main issue, with me, is the football match itself. Brazilians, myself included, just can't understand American football and its rules (I'm an even worse case since I don't even enjoy soccer; I know, shame on me!). And even though I'm not a big basketball fan either, a movie like "Hoop Dreams" managed to engage me throughout because of the humanity of its characters and the visual and narrative vigor of that long film. Not to say the players in "Harvard Beats Yale 29-29" aren't charismatic or remotely interesting; they are. But I believe being a football fan helps a lot in order to fully enjoy this film. My verdict: a fine documentary, but the thematic sport just isn't for me.