Word: curmudgeon
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...Curmudgeon...
Cover Up (United Artists) is a doubtful little melodrama with a doubtful moral thesis: murder is excusable when the victim is an unpopular curmudgeon. The film's makers avoid an out & out tussle with the Johnston Office by killing off the murderer, a kindly old doctor, before Insurance Investigator Dennis O'Keefe can catch up with him. But, preoccupied with Dennis' courtship of a suspect's daughter (Barbara Britton), they blithely overlook the fact that a local banker was an accessory to murder and that Sheriff William Bendix shut his eyes to the crime. The rather...
Temporarily ensconced at Chipping Lodge is Mrs. Brocken's brother-in-law Simon, the sort of crabbed but basically kindhearted curmudgeon who has been a reliable fixture of English novels for several centuries. Simon is decidedly hostile to modern life: "I look back to 1912 as the highest point of civilization, from which we have been steadily retrogressing ever since." Together with some mildly romantic young folk, Mrs. Brocken and her brother-in-law manage to live in pleasant decorum, with each member of the household sensible enough to mind his own business and respect the others' peculiarities...
...reading the magazine, my ardor in pursuing this sadistic task has been rather dampened by the quality of some of the material under consideration. Two stories, one poem, and one picture in the current issue are, I think, admirable, a fact which makes the magazine frustrating to the professional curmudgeon but rewarding to the reader...
...Curmudgeon probably didn't know any better but certainly Davies, being a director of Standard Oil of California, was up to his capitalistic tricks. The conclusion of Mr. lakes was arrived at by the very amateurish method of dividing known reserves by present output. "Known reserves" is a misleading term because new methods of getting petroleum out of nature are discovered at a greater rate than it can be consumed...