Harvey (1950): The Alley Scene

Re-posted by N.S.

Harvey was a Pulitzer-Prize winning, 1944 play by Mary Chase that is an ode to alcohol. It tells of an aging widow’s attempts to marry off her daughter, and get her inebriate brother, Elwood, institutionalized. Elwood believes he has a friend, Harvey, who is a “pooka,” an invisible, 6’3 ½” rabbit.

Harvey was staged during the golden decade of fantasy and saloons, a decade in which Bill Saroyan’s drunks engaged in world-class banter in bars. (Saroyan was an Armenian from San Jose.) It was also a decade in which, as a habitue at a movie music blog, which I only staggered into once observed, screenwriters and directors took to provide scenes in which character actors got to deliver grand soliloquies. The commenter waxed particularly eloquent about Muley’s speech early in Ford and Johnson’s The Grapes of Wrath (1940), as delivered by John Qualen. (“Do you think I’m touched?”)

Harvey is a Top 100 picture, for which Jimmy Stewart was nominated for Best Actor, and Josephine Hull won the Oscar for Best Supporting Actress as Stewart’s older sister.

Other Top 100 masterpieces starring Stewart were:

Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939);

The Philadelphia Story (1940);

It’s a Wonderful Life (1946);

Rear Window (1954); and

Vertigo (1958)

No other actor starred in so many Top 100 pictures.


@JakeMcClake2
3 months ago

“They really made an incredibly likeable character in Mister Elwood P. Dowd. It requires a great deal of faith in the goodness of humanity to believe someone like Elwood P. Dowd ever could exist. Maybe more than it requires to believe that Harvey exists.”