Movie Log: Harvey

The only other time I saw Harvey was in a hotel room in the early '80s, when my family almost moved to Washington, DC. So it was about time to see it again.

It's very old-fashioned, very stagy, and relies on a certain bland mid-century mindset and outlook. (What, I wondered about one reel into this movie, do all the self-satisfied well-upholstered well-off middle-aged women do with themselves these days? I guess most of them have real jobs, and a fair number of them run Fortune 500 companies.)

It took a good reel or two before I could even take Harvey seriously, this time through -- it just doesn't play as a naturalistic movie at all, anymore, so you have to accept its world for the duration.

Jimmy Stewart plays Elwood P. Dowd, scion of a wealthy, socially prominent family in wherever-the-hell-this-is, who was relatively normal until his mother died a few years back. Since then, he's become a raging alcoholic (by '50s movie standards: he drinks as much as the heroes of every other movie do, but shows the effects a bit more) who claims his best friend and constant companion is a six-foot tall invisible rabbit.

As far as plot goes, his sister (Josephine Hull, playing roughly the Margaret Dumont role from every Marx Brothers movie) tries to have him committed to a nearby asylum, but hyuk! hyuk! they think she's crazy! (Can you beat that!?) Now it's possible that this plot was new and virginal in 1950, but I suspect not -- I expect there are a half-dozen Elizabethan plays with similar set-ups, and probably a fair bit of Aristophanes. The asylum is the typical abusive snake-pit, of course, even though all of the folks associated with it are proverbial Good Eggs -- this doesn't exactly make sense, and makes the movie seem to portray a view of good mental health as a matter of sufficient physical torment, but leave that aside for now.

So Harvey is very much a movie of its times, and it's entirely held together by Stewart's Dowd, who is nicer and pleasanter than can adequately be described. It's a good performance, and we certainly always have the sense that he believes in Harvey, but it is a bit too nice.

Harvey is still an entertaining movie, but it was a cartoon when it was made, and it's now a cartoon of something that's no longer familiar at all, so even the exaggerations don't entirely make sense anymore. If you have any interest in classic film comedy, you need to see it, but remember that it was a play first, that it was made in 1950, and that Hollywood has never gotten anything about psychology correct.

Still, I'll always have a soft spot for the film that gave the world one of my favorite quotes:

Years ago my mother used to say to me, she'd say, "In this world, Elwood, you must be" -- she always called me Elwood -- "In this world, Elwood, you must be oh so smart or oh so pleasant." Well, for years I was smart. I recommend pleasant. You may quote me.