Harvey


Harvey is a 1950 film in black and white based on Mary Chase’s Pulitzer play of the same name. It was directed by Henry Custer and it starred James and Josephine Hull. Stewart earned a Best Actor Oscar nomination. In June of last year -2008- American Film Institute revealed its Ten Top Ten –the best ten films in ten `classic´ American film genres, and Harvey was acknowledge as the seventh best film in the fantasy genre. It is set in California, and it is about a good natural, affable, eccentric man called Elwood, Elwood P. Dowd, who’s known by everybody in all bars and saloons in his small town. He’s polite and cheerful and always friendly toward any strangers he might meet with, but he has just a problem: his best friend is an invisible six-foot-tall rabbit (a pooka, a mythical Celtic animal). Wherever he goes, he brings an extra hat and coat for Harvey and he buys theatre and railroad tickets in twos so that they can go everywhere together. His society-conscious sister and her men-hungry daughter try to have Elwood committed to a sanatorium. They seem to be unsure whether Dowd’s obsession with Harvey is an attempt to embarrass them or a product of his propensity to drink or a mental illness. But things are simpler; Elwood only prefers the Harvey’s fantasy to conventional routine. Elwood sums up his lifestyle when, in a later scene, he tells Dr. Chumley –his psychiatrist, who see Harvey too (so Harvey only can be seen by imaginative persons who are fed up with their kind of life) - that his mother used to tell him, `Elwood, in this world you must be oh so smart or, oh so pleasant. For years, I was smart. I recommend being pleasant´.

La procrastinación del patito feo.

No tuvo suerte. Pasó su infancia rechazado por todos, intentando aparentar ser como los demás. Y cuando, por fin, supo que era un cisne porque otros cisnes así se lo mostraron, entonces cayó en una crisis de autoestima de tal tamaño que comenzó a desarrollar una conducta evasiva altamente inmadura. El perfeccionismo extremo y el miedo al fracaso le dejaron sin plumas. El cuello, tan blanco y esbelto, se le tiñó de un amarillo rancio y se le encogió por completo. Prefirió dejar para más tarde el compromiso angustiante de seguir siendo cisne. Y decidió convertirse en el pato feo y simple que al principio creyó ser para así poder chapotear en el agua sin necesidad de sobresalir en nada.

The Ugly Duckling´s procrastination.

As soon as he grew into a swan he experienced such identity crisis that he started developing a highly evasive, immature behavior. He procrastinated his stressing compromise to be a swan; he decided to duck as the ugly duckling he had got used to being, and to splash around without standing up from the rest.