Jimmy Stewart Harvey
Tuesday, July 15th, 2008
Harvey is a rabbit.
Or is he?
It’s hard to tell, really, because Harvey is invisible. And to most people he’s the product of Elwood P. Dowd’s imagination. Dowd, declared by family members and friends alike to be a friendly, cheerful mental case, travels everywhere with his six-foot, three-and-a-half inch companion in tow.
This is the setting for Harvey, a 1950 movie starring Jimmy Stewart as the doubtful Dowd who faces incarceration at a sanitorium for constantly referring to Harvey. His sister tries to have him committed but he manages to slip away with Harvey, and is eventually found at Harvey’s favorite bar - the place they first met.
Once he’s returned to the sanitorium and is threatened with a needle that would make Harvey disappear from his mind, his sister decides it’s not worth it to rob Dowd of his imagination. She calls off the procedure just in time and lets her brother go free.
So is Dowd mad? Possibly; but there are quite a few hints in the movie that Harvey is something more than just a figment of Dowd’s imagination.