Matt Moore — Content to Be Single (1926) 🇺🇸
Harry Leon Wilson hadn’t heard of Matt Moore when he wrote “Bunker Bean,” but the story is admirably tailored to fit Matt’s personality.
A whimsical fellow, this timid young man of Wilson’s, who dreams of glory — one of those stepped-upon and shoved-aside, lack-luster folks, of no consequence to anybody, who through the gateway of fancy walk in glory. He imagines himself, as the mood strikes him, to be Napoleon; then the descendant of an ancient Egyptian king, a born ruler of men. Dreaming gives him confidence and, quite by accident, the unreality of his inner thought-life comes true. These are situations which furnish hilarious comedy.
Matt does not believe himself to be the reincarnation of Napoleon, but he might nevertheless well be the dreaming stenographer. For he sits by himself, a little away from things, and idles through spare hours with fancies.
His pet dream is to play Peer Gynt.
“Barring that,” he says, “I should like to create a film character such as we have in Bunker Bean, and carry him through a series of pictures. There are so many people like that, who find their release from everyday, monotonous life in imaginative fancy, always seeing themselves perform noble deeds, winning honors. Some day, I shall become violent, kidnap one of these Warner Brothers scenarists, and hold him captive on rations of Dread and water, until he agrees to write me stories of dreams.”
Since those early days of the movies that produced a number of our present stars, Matt has been acting for the camera, ambling along in his own slow manner. As year has succeeded year, fie has been adding to his salary check steadily, but not to a figure worthy of headlines, and has been gradually elevating his place in the film world, but with no conspicuous attainment.
One thinks of him as one of that regiment of “fill-in-the-gaps” people, a man whom everybody likes, and who seems capable of an achievement that he somehow has just missed. Improper casting, Hollywood has decided, and yet cannot definitely assign a niche to Matt.
“I haven’t known exactly where I belonged, or what I wanted, but “have taken what seemed best,” he explains. “Flares — I don’t believe in them. They go out. It’s better never to be a big success, than to reach the top and flop. I’ll never flop,” he adds with a grin, “because I’ll never be great enough to have far to drop.”
A peculiar lad, Matt. His charm has no definite, outstanding points. He is the sort you must know a long time to appreciate, the kind you like immensely, and yet in whom you find nothing startling enough to form an arresting pen picture.
Being a dreamer, he is always in love — usually from a distance — with one or another of the screen’s fair charmers, most often the vamps. Either he is too timorous to broach matrimonial suggestion, or else the ideal’s allurements fade upon a closer acquaintance. At any rate, he remains in single blessedness.
“The reason I don’t marry,” he replies to questions, “is because I’m afraid that if once I started, I might, like my brothers [Joe Moore | Owen Moore | Tom Moore], get the habit.”
He lives at the beach, with a Japanese servitor looking after his needs. It is a comfortable house atop a cliff. From the veranda, with his binoculars, he can sweep the sands below. If he spies somebody he knows and would like to talk to, he ambles down; if people are present for whom he doesn’t care, he contents himself with a book, or with taking pictures of the temperamental sea with his trick camera, or with tuning in on the radio.
An unhurried, uninspired existence. But it suits amiable, even-tempered Matt.
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Collection: Picture Play Magazine, January 1926