A & E

On Nov. 23, 1968, the cardinal headlines of the year had already been written: the Tet Offensive, the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy, the police riots at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. But on a football field in Cambridge, Mass., another kind of event would take place, one that to this day is recalled as a symbolic and substantive example of the great paradigm shift that was the '60s.

The event was the season-ending football game between Harvard and Yale, whose teams arrived on Harvard's home field undefeated. In "Harvard Beats Yale 29-29," filmmaker Kevin Rafferty takes viewers through the fateful game to its nail-biting final minutes and seconds, all the while limning the politics, culture and permutations of socioeconomic class that formed its context. Toggling between gorgeous 16mm footage of the game and present-day talking-head interviews with the players, Rafferty holds to a no-frills aesthetic, a deceptively simple formal choice that brings the men and all they carried into potent, uncompromising relief.

The game itself would be amazing enough to revisit, with its climactic come-from-behind surge, but Rafferty also smoothly works in the head-spinning number of coincidences that reverberated from it, which would be played out in the anti-war movement, the "Doonesbury" comic strip and Bush v. Gore (and we haven't even mentioned where Meryl Streep comes in). By way of both sport and social history, "Harvard Beats Yale 29-29" movingly recounts how everybody won the day the Crimson tied.

• Harris Theater, Downtown

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