Harvey (1950)
Elwood P. Dowd can see a six foot, three-and-a-half inch “pooka”; he doesn’t have a problem with that, but everyone else sure does.
Look, this is a trivia blog, but the wise words of Elwood P. Dowd are still worth noting:
Years ago, my mother used to say to me, she'd say, ‘In this world, Elwood, you can be oh so so smart, or oh so pleasant.’ Well, for years I was smart...I recommend pleasant.
Let’s keep that in mind during our trivia journey.
Jimmy Stewart, the everyman par excellence, anchors Harvey, a screwball comedy from 1950. Stewart plays Elwood, the straight man who also happens to be the only one who can see Harvey, a giant rabbit. Elwood’s sister’s quest to get him committed to a psychiatric hospital is the intrigue of the film and causes plenty of “Three’s Company”-esque misunderstandings, including the sister accidentally getting herself committed.
Elwood’s “mental illness” manifests through his disarmingly kind and completely content demeanor. In a way, he’s the anti-Cyrano—where Cyrano was bold, vengeful, and unfailingly competent, Elwood is sweet, oblivious, and unfailingly loving, even to those who try and hurt him. And while Elwood is considered a failure by his sister, his perceived shortcomings are simply his differences that aren’t assets in a capitalist society.
Harvey presciently comments on today’s dialogue about neurodivergence, a dialogue that espouses the virtues of “thinking different” for the benefit of creativity or success. Harvey subverts these arguments, instead showing that Elwood’s kindness and sensitivity should be valued without consideration of the economic value of those traits. Just look how happy he looks!
Rating: 8/10, why don’t we make screwball comedies anymore?
Cast and crew:
We’ll start with Jimmy Stewart, and we’re catching him in the middle of one of the great Hollywood careers. His instantly-recognizable drawl and gangly demeanor don’t suggest “Hollywood leading man,” but there’s something about his on-screen persona that just charms the hell out of you. By 1950, he’s already starred in the classics Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939), The Philadelphia Story (1940, for which he won his only competitive Oscar), and It’s A Wonderful Life (1946). Harvey doubles down on the innocence-bordering-on-naiveté you see in Stewart’s earlier work and the returns are still there.1 We’ll see Stewart back in this column at the end of the 1950s and it’ll be after another decade of iconic performances.
Josephine Hull, who plays Elwood’s sister Veta, can boil her career down to two roles where she gives all-time heat check performances. This is one of them; her yowls won her an Oscar. The other is in Arsenic and Old Lace (1944), a comedy starring Cary Grant where Hull plays one of two older women who have made a hobby out of mercy-killing old bachelors.
Jeopardy has asked for Mary Chase, the author of the 1944 play “Harvey” and winner of the 1945 Pulitzer in drama, exactly once. It was a triple stumper. Still, “Harvey” the play is the sixth longest-running Broadway non-musical ever2, so even if Mary Chase is famous for nothing else, “Harvey” is enough to hang one’s hat on.
The trivia
During the film, Elwood sits and reads “Sense and Sensibility.” Its first line is “The family of Dashwood had long been settled in Sussex.” That novel, Jane Austen’s first (published under the authorship of “A Lady”), had the original name "Elinor and Marianne," after its two sister protagonists.
Wilson, the orderly at the sanitarium, carries that old-timey law enforcement short club seen below. What’s that thing called?
It’s a blackjack.3 The front end is weighted and when you whack someone with it, it hurts a bunch. By the 1990s the police had mostly banned them because of how bad concussions are for you.
Oh, and what about pookas (or “pucas”)? Well, I’m no fairy mythologist, so here’s a fun Shakespeare fact: the character Puck from “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” gets his name from the word “puca.” Puck (or Robin Goodfellow) is a trickster fairy who replaces Bottom’s head with that of a donkey.4
Odds and ends
Some of the people tied to leading a remake of Harvey have been Tom Hanks (sure, that could work), Robert Downey Jr., (I don’t really see it), Jim Carrey (no), Adam Sandler (definitely no), and Will Smith (well, I’m sure that made more sense in 2010).
Though some of that success is explained by this Tropic Thunder clip that is as insightful as it is offensive.
“Harvey” trails “Life with Father,” “Tobacco Road,” “Abie's Irish Rose,” “Deathtrap,” and “Gemini.” It probably tells you something about the waning popularity of stage plays that the most recent one on that list closed over 40 years ago.
Wilson carries a blackjack, but what the man is holding in the Simpsons picture is a sap. A sap has a flat head while a blackjack has a rounded head.
Since this column has to look backwards over decades of movie history, we’ve already mentioned two Mickey Rooney movies in passing—Boys Town (1938) and National Velvet (1944). Well, Rooney also played Puck in a 1935 film adaptation of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. While we’re free associating, note that perhaps Rooney’s most famous role was the teenager Andy Hardy in sixteen (!) movies, including some with Judy Garland. And I know you thought we lost the thread, but in Rooney and Garland’s first movie together, 1937’s Thoroughbreds Don’t Cry (not an Andy Hardy movie), the horse was named The Pookah. See? Back where we started.