Harvey (Universal-International, 1950)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Sunday, April 20) my husband Charles and I watched a couple of films on Turner Classic Movies, the 1950 version of Harvey and the 1925 silent Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ. I’m assuming the programmers at TCM picked Harvey because it’s about the imaginary (or is he imaginary?) six-foot tall rabbit friend of Elwood P. Dowd (James Stewart), who goes out with him just about everywhere he goes. Harvey began life as a stage play by Mary Chase, who premiered it on Broadway in 1944 with Frank Fay playing Dowd. Frank Fay was a now-obscure performer whom TCM host Ben Mankiewicz credited with inventing stand-up comedy – which is ridiculous. There were plenty of stand-up comedians in vaudeville; they were just billed as “monologuists.” Fay also lived a real-life version of A Star Is Born: he was an already established star on vaudeville and in films when he married a Broadway dancer named Ruby Stephens and brought her with him to Hollywood. He energetically promoted her movie career under her new name, Barbara Stanwyck, only he started drinking more and more. His career fell as hers rose, and in 1935 she divorced him and shortly thereafter married Robert Taylor. Fay grabbed the part of Elwood P. Dowd in the stage version of Harvey hoping it would be a comeback vehicle for him both on stage and in films, but Universal-International bought the movie rights and wanted a more bankable “name” for the movie lead. They found him in James Stewart, whom they’d just picked up on a series of percentage deals under which he was paid part of the profits of a film rather than a straight salary. He’d just made himself three-quarters of a million dollars on Winchester .73 and he went on to play Dowd (whom he’d already played on stage for a few weeks as a substitute for Fay).

Mankiewicz said that Elwood P. Dowd was Stewart’s favorite among his own roles, which quite frankly I find hard to believe. I can think of at least five Stewart films that I’d prefer over this one: Frank Capra’s Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939) and It’s a Wonderful Life (1946), Anthony Mann’s Winchester .73 (1950), and Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window (1954) and Vertigo (1958). All of those stretched him far more as an actor than Harvey did. The plot features Elwood P. Dowd living in an elaborate house in a Middle Western town with his sister Veta Louise Dowd Simmons (Josephine Hull, who’d played the part on stage as well) and Veta’s daughter Myrtle Mae Simmons (Victoria Horne). Elwood’s and Veta’s mother left Elwood the house (and, presumably, enough accumulated wealth that he doesn’t have to work) and Veta is resentful of her status as essentially a boarder in a house she thought should have gone to her instead. She’s also planning an afternoon lunch party at which she’s carefully made sure that Elwood doesn’t know about so he can’t come home and drive all her guests away by talking to his invisible rabbit friend. Alas, Elwood finds out about it from an ex-con friend of his who hangs out with him and Harvey at Charlie’s Bar. It turns out the local newspaper actually advertised the event in their social column, and Elwood’s friend points it out to him and wonders why he hadn’t heard of it already. Veta says the purpose of the party is to help get Marcia Mae out more often so she can find a man to marry, but all the guests are older dowager ladies like Veta herself and how that’s going to help Veta find a husband is a mystery locked in Mary Chase’s head. (Chase not only wrote the original play but co-wrote the screenplay with Universal regular Oscar Brodney.)

Veta is determined to get Elwood committed to a mental hospital owned by Dr. William Chumley (Cecil Kellaway), but in a neat role-reversal, when she and Elwood show up at Chumley’s institution, she’s considered the crazy one and is taken into custody by the hospital’s thug-like orderly, Martin Wilson (Jesse White). Though Dr. Chumley is nominally the one in charge, the place is run day to day by his assistant, Dr. Raymond Sanderson (Charles Drake), whose nurse, Miss Kelly (Peggy Dow), is in unrequited love with him. There are some quite charming and rather ironic moments in Harvey, including a great scene in which there’s a complete role-reversal between Elwood and Dr. Chumley in which Elwood ends up in the analyst’s chair and Chumley lies on his office couch in the classic analysand’s pose. But Harvey dates rather badly because Elwood P. Dowd is just too nice and too morally superior to everyone else in the film. He innocently goes through life – in one neat bit of dialogue he says that he’s been fighting reality for decades and now he’s finally beaten reality, which makes us suspect that he knows Harvey isn’t real but he also doesn’t care – and among the things he does that shows his moral superiority to everyone else in the movie he plays matchmaker not only between Dr. Sanderson and Nurse Kelly, but also between his niece Marcia Mae and Martin Wilson. Charles remembered a made-for-TV remake – which turned out to be from 1972, with Stewart repeating his role (well, since Elwood P. Dowd is drawn as essentially asexual, it didn’t matter that he was 22 years older) – though if there’s anyone I’d like to see remake Harvey today, it would be director Tim Burton as a vehicle for his favorite star, Johnny Depp.

The 1950 Harvey was directed by Henry Koster, who “made his bones” in Hollywood directing Deanna Durbin in her star-making musicals Three Smart Girls (1936) and One Hundred Men and a Girl (1937) before he went on to make another charming farce, The Bishop’s Wife (1947) with Loretta Young, David Niven, and Cary Grant. (Apparently Grant was one of the actors short-listed for the part of Elwood P. Dowd as well.) Then after Harvey Koster got side-tracked into big, splashy historical epics like the Biblical tale The Robe (1953) and more secular films like Desirée (1954) and Bette Davis’s second “go” at Queen Elizabeth, The Virgin Queen (1955) – while another expatriate from the German-speaking world, Fritz Lang, got stuck with vest-pocket romantic melodramas and films noir when he’d established his spectacle credentials in the 1920’s with Die Nibelungen and Metropolis. Harvey is a well-loved movie but my problem with it is that Stewart’s character is just too well-loved. He’s almost a caricature of the “Jimmy Stewart” image, and quite frankly I like him better in films like the five I mentioned above, as well as his, John Wayne’s and John Ford’s late-careers masterpiece The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962), which has grit and toughness the charming but paper-thin fantasy of Harvey lacks. The makers of Harvey even tried to pull off Val Lewton’s old trick of keeping it ambiguous as to whether the monster (or, in this case, the charming upright-walking giant rabbit) really exists, down to pulling the old trick from Universal’s Invisible Man movies of showing doors opening and closing seemingly by themselves. I also didn’t like the ending, in which Elwood says a fond farewell to Harvey, who’s decided (we’re told) to stay at the sanitarium with Dr. Chumley and become his imaginary (or not) friend, only Harvey decides to bail on Chumley and go home with Elwood instead. Having Harvey stay at the sanitarium would at least have solved Elwood’s social problems with his family, and that’s where I thought Mary Chase was going with this – but no-o-o-o-o.