Movie: Harvard Beats Yale 29-29

I have not had this much fun at a movie in a very long time.

I think I liked it so much because it worked for me on so many levels. The movie consists of clips of interviews from the players with clips from the television coverage of the game. You might think that Harvard and Yale types would be smart enough not to take the rope given to them by someone with a camera and metaphorically hang themselves in an interview but you would be wrong if you thought that. Even actor Tommie Lee Jones, who played for Harvard in the game, comes off like he is on ludes in the interviews (though one of the highlights is his miserable example of what a funny guy Al Gore was in college). The interviews take place in people's homes and offices and I was surprised at both how modest and how badly decorated some of them are.

So in addition to the story of an amazing football game, you get some history of football, the history of television coverage of football (I had forgotten that they used to have INSTANT REPLAY in big letters at the bottom of the screen so that viewers would not confuse replays with live action back when replays were new), insight into the 60s as they played out on Ivy League campuses and so on. And you get the sociology of the college football, and not just any college football, but college football as played and recalled by smart, surprisingly reflective guys at Harvard and Yale.

And there is broader social history. I did not remember that Yale and Harvard were both still all-male in 1968 and that, at least as Yale, ties were still required at meals. A couple of the players talk about the impact of the arrival of the pill on their campuses. Others talk about how football helped to submerge political differences both on their team and on campus more broadly.

I was entranced from beginning to end.

Rotten Tomatoes reviews here. They like it too.

Harvard magazine story about the headline from the Crimson that provides the movie its title here.

Highly recommended.

Addendum: NYT interview with director Kevin Rafferty here. I think the bad decorating I mention above is probably from the Cambridge bed and breakfast mentioned in the interview.