Fresh
Harvey, Mary Chase's Pulitzer Prize play, loses little of its whimsical comedy charm in the screen translation.
Variety Staff, Variety
Harvey
The Wonderful Pulitzer Prize Play … becomes one of the Great Motion Pictures of our Time!
1950 · 1h 44m · Approved
Comedy, Fantasy
Directed by
Henry Koster
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Harvey
Overview
The story of Elwood P. Dowd who makes friends with a spirit taking the form of a human-sized rabbit named Harvey that only he sees (and a few privileged others on occasion also.) After his sister tries to commit him to a mental institution, a comedy of errors ensues. Elwood and Harvey become the catalysts for a family mending its wounds and for romance blossoming in unexpected places.
Director and cast
- Henry Koster Director
- James Stewart as Elwood P. Dowd
- Josephine Hull as Veta Louise Simmons
- Peggy Dow as Miss Kelly
- Charles Drake as Dr. Sanderson
- Cecil Kellaway as Dr. Chumley
- Victoria Horne as Myrtle Mae Simmons
- Jesse White as Marvin Wilson - orderly
- William H. Lynn Cast
- Wallace Ford Cast
- Dick Wessel Cast
Critics on Rotten Tomatoes
Top critics, in their words
88%
Tomatometer
Fresh
If you're for warm and gentle whimsey, for a charmingly fanciful farce and for a little touch of pathos anent the fateful evanescence of man's dreams, then the movie version of Harvey is definitely for you.
Bosley Crowther, New York Times
Rotten
Charming, lightweight stuff (from a play by Mary Chase), so long as you can take Stewart's ingenuousness, but it does wear thin.
Derek Adams, Time Out
Rotten
Unhappily, what the film also borrows from the play, and somehow makes more conspicuous, is a tendency to drag its feet for long stretches, especially during the virtually actionless last third of the story.
TIME Magazine
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