Motion Picture Classic (Jul-Dec 1930)

He Lived It Down By GLADYS HALL (HE has Infant grown gray beard, th Industry a long T _^ The Infant Industry has finally produced its second generation — all grown up and knocking at our doors. We are grown ripe with years and laden down with honors. Our babes and sucklings are polished young men. "Little Ben Alexander" and "The Kid," J. Coogan — once, so short a while ago, rompered darlings tugging at our heartstrings and tempting us to buy them lollipops and kiddie-kars — are now come back as lovers, as soldiers, as romantic heroes and swashbuckling villains. Adult. Educated. Finished and ready to snatch the bay-leaves right out of the hands of their aging seniors. It is a thought, a fact, to give pause. For this is the first second generation the movies have ever known. This is the first time that there are young hands to take the torches as they fall from older hands. The children — our own children — have grown up' It is of "Little Ben Alexander" that we write. And this is the place to say that if you care to make the grade with Ben, you will not greet him with the common effusion, "Oh, this is Not Little Ben Alexander!" His prayer is that some day people will cease to gawp at him and express their amazement that he has not stayed six or seven years of age. Another prayer is that his mother will conceal in the ambush of the Family Album the infant photograph of him as an al fresco cherub, sporting with a garland of roses. He feels that the time has come . . . Time's Little Joke "T ITTLE Ben" played his very I ^ first screen role with Mary Pickford m "The Little American." Grownup Ben is now playing with Mary in her present vehicle. Time plays odd chicaneries. Little Ben is little no longer, America The boy who came back: in circle above, in the days when he was "the child wonder"; below, juat before he forgot about the screen ; at top, the tragic Kemznerich of "All Quiet on the Western Front" An Infant Prodigy Grew Up And Became Ben Alexander Sweetheart remains the same. Hoopla, that men should age and women not! It was difficult for me to restrain myself when I went to lunch the other day to meet "Little Ben." I knew that some years had passed over his infant brow, of course. I did not expect him to run to meet me, wearing checkered rompers. But I was not prepared for the tallish, fairhaired young man with the level bright blue eyes, the somewhat ironic mouth, the finished manner, the very mature and excellently balanced mind. I restrained the "Oh, this is NOT Little Ben .Alexander!" I gulped it down, how happily for meJ Ben has grown up. He has grown up to be, at nineteen, a wise, mature, well-read young man. His reactions to life and to people are, you feel, the right reactions. The kind you would like your son, or your brother to have. He says he hopes he is not "a wholesome American boy." Asked what type he does think he is and how he would describe himself if he were doing a selfportrait, he laughed. He hasn't thought much about himself. The "War" Changed Him THERE have been — there are — too many outside interests, too many things to do, ool and games and money to earn. He has none of the morbid vaporings of literar> adolescence. He would not be admitted into the coterie of Beverly Nichols or his kind. He is wise, rather than sophisticated; sane, rather than suave. He says that things do "go on" among members of the lounger Generation, but those who do such things are in the minority and would be the same at any age, in any place. He says a film studio is as safe as a high school and no safer. It is the individual and not the locale . . . {Continued on page 88) 33