Well, of course, it's a
play, a damn
funny one, written by
Mary Chase. It opened for the first time in
New York City on
November 1, 1944, and it won a
Pulitzer Prize.
It was also a
movie, released in 1950 and directed by
Henry Koster. The
screenplay was written by
Oscar Brodney and the original
playwright,
Mary Chase. It starred
James Stewart as
Elwood P. Dowd,
Josephine Hull as Veta Louise Simmons,
Peggy Dow as Miss Kelly,
Charles Drake as Dr. Lyman Sanderson,
Cecil Kellaway as Dr. Willie Chumley,
Victoria Horne as Myrtle Mae Simmons,
Jesse White as Marvin Wilson,
William H. Lynn as Judge Omar Gaffney,
Wallace Ford as P.J. Lofgren... and
Harvey as himself.
Elwood P. Dowd is a
drunkard who claims that he is
best friends with a six-foot-tall
invisible rabbit named Harvey. Of course, no one else
believes in the existence of
six-foot-tall invisible rabbits, and Dowd spends a bit of time at a
sanitarium. He doesn't seem to mind much, as he is very
easy to get along with and doesn't think being
crazy is such a bad deal. And the longer Dowd is around, the less other people seem to care whether or not
they're crazy, too...
Hull, Horne, and White all re-created their
original roles in the
Broadway play for this
film, and Hull won an Oscar for it. You should watch it if you haven't seen it yet -- good god, man, do you think that
all head-trippin' cinema requires
black leather,
poor acting, and
wire fu?
Research from the Internet Movie Database (www.imdb.com)