?I love the aesthetic of throwing something and watching it fly.?

These words, spoken by an ambidextrous back-up quarterback who led his team to a stunning comeback against a heavily favoured arch-rival, apply just as well to Larry Levenson, the amoral libertarian who was determined to take his Manhattan hetero sex club and make it fly in the face of social and moral critics, not to mention good hygiene. (No matter what anyone ate at the club?s notoriously sketchy free buffet, they usually got a not-so-healthy helping of crabs.)

Going into this seemingly mismatched double bill Friday night at the AMC theatres, I had no idea that these two films ? Kevin Rafferty?s lovingly nostalgic and riveting nail-biter Harvard Beats Yale 29-29, about a famous 1968 football game between the two Ivy League stalwarts, and Mathew Kaufman and Jon Hart?s subculture biopic American Swingers, about the den of 1970?s New York iniquity that was Plato?s Retreat ? would cover such similar cultural and thematic ground.

NEITHER film left its audience disappointed. American Swingers follows through on its promise to take you inside the intriguing life of Levenson, a perfectly average American man who chose to give his dark side a big warm hug (and a group hug, at that!). Thanks to a treasure trove of footage shot through the steam of the club?s hot tubs and across the mounds of flesh piled on top of itself in the ?mattress room?, the film takes us deep inside the infamous swingers club that epitomized the danger-tinged adventurousness and experimentation of the New York underground of the 1970?s, and also served as a direct target for fears of sexually transmitted disease in the 1980?s.   

The film?s bouncy, buoyant tone takes you confidently by the hand and leads you down the rabbit hole into a subculture of truly colourful individuals who, not without exception, found something empowering and freeing within the judgment-free velvet walls of Plato?s Retreat. As one subject notes: ?You went in and faced your inhibitions. And then you never had to face them again.?

It?s worth noting that this line is spoken by a woman, who, along with several others in the film, talks of the times as being empowering ones for women?s sexuality, allowing them to step out of the passivity they?d been engendered to accept and take on a more active role in recognizing and realizing the sexual sides of their selves. This point is also raised in Harvard Beats Yale 29-29, when one of the players recounts the seismic cultural shift introduced by the birth control pill, when women went from being ?seen and not heard, more as a kind of ornamentation? to taking on more active roles in dating and mating rituals.

Admittedly, these cultural side-notes serve more as a kind of pre-game warm-up and half-time intermission in Harvard Beats Yale, which builds its low-key structure towards a recounting of the big game that replicates the nail-biting tension of the event itself. Still, for all its skillful emphasis on the myriad interpersonal dynamics that makes sports, and particularly football, such a microcosm of machismo and manhood, the film is packed full of little non-sequitor gems. Not the least of which is a scene in which Tommy Lee Jones (a Harvard half-back) recalls how his roommate, a fellow Southerner by the name of Al Gore, was so fascinated by the advent of the touch tone telephone that he learned to play Dixie on the push pads as though it were a keyboard ? and then played the tune for friends and visitors as entertainment. Jones?s delivery takes the term ?stoneface? to an astronomical new height.

Director Kevin Rafferty (above left, with Real to Reel coordinator Camille Djokoto) mentioned in his introduction to the film that he hasn?t had as much fun making a movie since his very first one decades ago. And that enthusiasm certainly wore off on the audience Friday night. Harvard Beats Yale 29-29 once more on Sunday at 3:30 at AMC 9, and again on Saturday September 13 at 12:15pm at AMC 2. Kaufman and Hart?s film Swings your way today at 4:30 at AMC 9 and Friday, September 12 at 9:00pm at AMC 2.