Motion Picture Classic (1923, 1924, 1926)

A Happy Youn^ Man Bv FAITH SERVICE Yo{' N>> seldom meet ■ happy young man. You so seldom meet people admittedl) happy, who can tell you win they are happ) and expect to con tinue to l>e happ) even in the face of the fact that they know they may not. There seems to be, In this .ration, a sort of crusade against happiness. It isn't the style. It is what the dictionaries might refer to ,i< "disuse." It just isn't being done. It has come to be considered as "interesting" to be morose and melancholic, skeptical, cynical, super-Russian, thickly ironical. God and laughter and Santa Claus and Holy Matrimony, babies and blue skies and kind hearts and simple faiths . . . these are the dethroned idols of a vanished Yesterday. But Alfred Lunt, on the day I talked with him. was a very happy young man — by my observation and by his admission. Happy for many excellent and solid reasons, such as the fact that he is in love with his wife, in love with his work, was having his first vacation in many years, had just finished a picture be thought was good, and enjoys his mother rather more than any other woman he knows. Not because his mother happens, by a fortuitous accident'of biology, to be his mother, but because she is. by herself and in herself, a personage. He told me sympathetic and delightfully appreciative things about her. How that he is the child of her first marriage, the only child. How she married again, a Scandinavian gentleman, I believe, and has two or three other children ; two girls among them. How she always longed for one of her children, all of them jZA if possible, to go on the stage. How delighted she is because he, Alfred. did go. How she Above is young M r . Lunt living up to the title , and right, as he appears in ''Second Youth," a Distinctive Picture Photograph by Pach Brothers still tries to urge the \!\\ 140 and i milled the) K'lu i and an ada mantly disin< lined. Vnd how she would have liked to go on tin itage herself I le told iih something "i his former home, -till his mother's, in a mid Western tow n. of how she makes h<-r lips sen 1,1 because it ami her and arranges hei 1" t i fill hair into an intricate and interesting coiffure, "to charm," her fond son said. "the potato buj^s. I suppos Mr. Lunt believes with some of the perhaps less popular moderns in the theory that a child owerather less to the parent than the parent to the child. That if there be a bond of sympathy and congeniality, well and good. But if the bond does exist it is not because they are mother and child. of necessity, but simply because they are two per with a common point of view and a respect, the one for the other. At any rate, and theories aside, it is obviously enough a very delightful relationship between them. Well, his mother, then, is one reason for his happi; and I can think of no more basic, no better reason. Secondly, not necessarily in the order of importance but in the order of my paragraphic tendencies, is his wife. Lynn Fontanne. who made the play and name and character of "Dulcy" famous. Alfred fell in love with Lynn ''at first sight." Yes. an authentic case of the old poetic, cardiac collapse. I have heard people say that there is "no such thing.'' There is such a thing. Mr. Lunt did it. It happened in this wise: Mr. Lunt and Miss Fontanne were to rehearse in the same play, the name of which escapes me, and doesn't matter. Mr. Lunt was first upon the stage, a w h o 1 e hearted, emotionally comfortable enough l Cont'd on paii, Alfred Lunt is happy because he is in love with his wife and in love with his work; two very exc e 1 1 e n t reasons (Sixty-five >