Friday, November 3

He Said My Name Is Harvey



I forget how it came around to this, but today at lunch I was telling DaveS about one of my favourite scenes from the movie Harvey. While Harvey is not one of my favourite movies (I find it a bit slow moving in parts, it does contain a few fantastic scenes, mostly from Jimmy Stewart.. He had commented that the scene I was telling him about would maybe make a good monologue to have at the ready, say, for an audition. That was a thought I had when I recently watched the movie again, after not seeing it for a long time.
Well, through the wonder of YouTube, I was able to find a re-enactment of that very scene. And while this clip doesn't do the actual film scene any justice (Jimmy Stewart was a hundred-fold better than the actor in this clip), it does show the scene in its entirety. The re-enactment is performed by a YouTube regular, Brandon Hardesty, who has, among other videos, almost 20 re-enactments of movies, in which he plays all the roles. You should check some of them out.
Anyway, in this scene, Elwood P. Dowd (who is something of a town-drinker, and who claims to be friends with a pooka, named Harvey, who takes the form of an invisible 6 foot tall rabbit) is in an alley behind a bar, talking to a psychologist who is trying to figure out just how crazy Dowd is, to see if he should be institutionalized. The doctor asks Elwood how he came to know Harvey, and the scene is Elwood answering him. Again, while the re-enactment is somewhat entertaining in its own right, it nowhere does justice to Jimmy Stewart's performance on screen. Some night when you're in the mood for a good old comedy, and you've seen all the "great ones", this is one definitely worth checking out.



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