In 2000, during the promotional tour for ‘Náufrago’, a journalist asked Tom Hanks If you would be willing to put yourself in the shoes of the protagonist of a remake of ‘The Invisible Harvey’, the 1950 fantasy comedy whose cast already led James Stewart and a rabbit that doesn’t exist. The response was blunt: “It’s like saying that we are going to make a new version of ‘It’s a Wonderful Life!’ For what? Leave her alone. ‘Harvey’ is perfect as it is, thank you.”
Harvey: Origins. Before being a movie, ‘Invisible Harvey’ was a play. Its author, Mary Chase, took two years to write and premiered it on Broadway on November 1, 1944. It lasted 1,775 performances, until 1949, and in 1945 it won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama. In it, Elwood P. Dowd is an affable, bar-loving man who finds a good friend in Harvey, a six-foot white rabbit-like pooka (creature from Celtic mythology) that only he can see. His sister tries to put him in a clinic in a play that asks what exactly it means to be sane.
The movie. When Universal bought the rights, James Stewart was the natural choice for the lead. The film hit theaters in December 1950 and performed reasonably well: around $2.6 million in revenue, but insufficient to cover the high rights costs for the work. Josephine Hull won the Oscar for Best Supporting Actress and Stewart was nominated, but the memory of the film eventually faded in time, recovering decades later as a piece of unintentionally lysergic friendly fantasy cinema.
Other remakes… by Tom Hanks. Hanks rejected the project in 2000, but it cannot be said that the actor is opposed on principle to updating stories from the past. Or at least it wouldn’t be in a short time: in 2004 he starred in ‘The Ladykillers’ by the Coen brothers, a remake of Alexander Mackendrick’s 1955 British crime comedy ‘The Quintet of Death’. In 2022 he made ‘The Worst Neighbor in the World’, directed by Marc Forster, a direct adaptation of the Swedish ‘A Man Called Ove’ (2015) by Hannes Holm.
A remake that has a tail. ‘The Invisible Harvey’ has been on the verge of materializing on numerous occasions, without ever coming to fruition. Don Gregory acquired the rights in 1996 and ended up selling them to Miramax, which He didn’t do anything with them either.. In November 2003, John Travolta was in negotiations to star in a remake co-produced by Dimension Films and MGM, which also fell through.
The most serious attempt came in 2009, when Steven Spielberg he was interested in directing the film under the umbrella of Fox and DreamWorks. Spielberg’s first choice for Elwood was his frequent collaborator Tom Hanks, but when Hanks turned down the role, Spielberg shelved the project. Later the names of Robert Downey Jr. and other actors such as Jim Carrey or Adam Sandler circulated, without any of those names reaching beyond speculation. In December 2018, Netflix announced that it had picked up the rights to the project, with the writers of ‘Shrek 2’ and ‘The Smurfs’ on board. But since that announcement no progress has been made.
The versions that did exist. Although the film remake was never made, the film does have history on television. The first remake came in 1958, with Art Carney in the title role. It was well received at the time, but without leaving too much of a mark. In 1972 it was James Stewart himself who returned to the character, in a Hallmark Hall of Fame production for NBC. Stewart accepted this second opportunity because he was dissatisfied with his performance in the original film: the result was a darker version and more faithful to the play than to the film.
In 1996 the most forgotten version arrived: an adaptation for CBS with Harry Anderson as Elwood, and with Leslie Nielsen in the cast, with added scenes and a change of tone that was not very convincing. That same project was the one that Don Gregory ended up selling to Miramax when the rights to the film remake continued to float around.
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