Word: skinflint
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...snaring Horace Vandergelder (Paul Ford), possibly the richest merchant in all Yonkers in 1884. Her mission is complicated by the merchant's preference for finance rather than romance. "Marriage," he snorts, "is a bribe to make a housekeeper think she's a householder." Even worse, the old skinflint seems set on marrying somebody young. Author Wilder's solution, which involves exploding tomato tins, a pair of Vandergelder's clerks uprooting the City of New York, a pretty milliner whose rival is purely mythical, and a demoniac dinner party, makes no sense at all-but does make...
...Mexico" named Don Pedro Mejia joined with a viceroy to monopolize all the Indian maize and wheat in the country. The Indians and the poor appealed to the church, and Mexico's archbishop put the extortioner under a ban of excommunication. This failed to move the rich skinflint, so the church suspended all divine service. This meant total war, and the viceroy moved to arrest the archbishop. Gage's picture of the archbishop-mitered, robed, with the Host in his hand defying the King's officers-is a great scene despite Gage's intention; he only...
There is Cousin Honora, a whimsical skinflint who counts out the pennies to Leander's family and moves with haughty assurance from painting to the piano to whatnot, casually giving them up in turn and winding up in her old age as a Red Sox fan. But not even Honora can stay in the same league with old Cousin Justina, who is richer still (she married a five-and-dime prince) and dominates the lives of a little circle of pathetic hangers-on who are dependent upon her charity. When she discovers that Leander's son Moses...
...Tyrone family does not make a pretty picture. The mother (Inga Tidblad) is a dope fiend. The father is an actor (as O'Neill's father was) and a monumental skinflint. Jamie Tyrone is a wastrel and a drunkard like his father, and Edmund (Jarl Kulle), obviously patterned on O'Neill himself, is a consumptive. These four haunted characters spend their long day's journey into night gnawing at each other. They sit around the living room table drinking, talking, baring their minds, hating each other, yet cemented together in one miserable unit of family love...
They get precious little of it, for the duke is a skinflint. After every payday, he cheats his staff out of their wages in an unfriendly game of cards. Forever inviting guests, the duke is an outrageous host. The wine they admire, he knows will not "travel." Wheedled out of him and carted home, it tastes like vinegar. The villa's glittering bathrooms are tiled with condescending instructions: "Press handle down, hold for one minute and release with a slight jerk." The ten-year-old footman has been taught to speed departing guests with the final salute: "You-goddamned...