new york times reviewer Manohla Dargis likes Harvard Beats Yale 29-29, a documentary film by Kevin Rafferty ’70 that opened in Manhattan just in time for the big game this weekend. Dargis calls the film “preposterously entertaining” even for those who “routinely shun” the “pagan sacrament” of college football. (If you’re in Cambridge for the big game, you can catch the film at the Brattle Theatre.)
Dargis places the legendary 1968 game in its moment in history (the same year as the My Lai massacre and the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy) and writes that the game…
…remains a nail-biter despite the visual quality of the footage, which is so unadorned and so humble—and almost entirely in long shot—it looks like a dispatch from a foreign land. And in some ways it was: Football fans still wore raccoon coats to games and the women in the stands cheering for Yale could not attend the college. The same month, Yale announced it was (finally) opening that door.
Read her review here; read about the film and Rafferty in the current issue of Harvard Magazine here.
