Harvey

Sometimes I feel as if there are so many movies and so little time to watch them all! Getting back to the classics is so hard when new movies are coming out every week. One such movie I have never watched before is Harvey, starring James Stewart as Elwood P. Dowd and his imaginary friend, the six and a half foot tall rabbit Harvey. This film is based on a Pulitzer Prize winning play.


The existence of the imaginary rabbit plauges Elwood's sister Veta Louise (Josephine Hull), who tries to prevent Elwood from talking about the rabbit.  She often diverts his attention in front of others in order to hide his behavior. She has also been trying to get her daughter, the aging and homely Myrtle (Victoria Horne), set in society and married off, except everyone runs off when they hear of Harvey.

Elwood also is such an easy going guy, he invites strangers home for dinner, usually of the homeless and working class, which is beneath his sister's class of friends. His behavior has become so disruptive that the sister does something she has been trying to avoid--commit him to a mental ward. When she does so though, it becomes a comedy of errors: mixups cause the hospital staff to believe SHE is the one that needs to be committed, and then the head doctor (Cecil Kellaway) begins to believe Elwood after all. The Veta Louise realizes that a treatment will turn Elwood into a misanthropist, something she doesn't want, so at the last minute she changes her mind.

At the end the film suggests that Harvey is in fact real, just unseen by non-believers. Elwood's adventure affects everyone around him, for the better.

On the surface it is not a serious story, so one has to look for metaphors and such to quantify why the story won a Pulitzer Prize. Perhaps I was waiting for something a little more dark, or for Elwood to wink his eye at the audience or have a flash of sanity when he is alone. For me, it started out a curiousity but didn't elevate much beyond that, and felt like a one trick pony.