Here’s Thorton Wilder in a 1937 letter to Mabel Dodger Luhan:

In Austria or France go to see a Ginger-Rogers-Fred-Astaire movie. Watch the audience. Spell-bound at something terribly uneuropean–all that technical effortless precision; all that radiant youth bursting with sex but not sex-hunting, sex-collecting; and all that allusion to money, but money as fun, the American love of conspicuous waste, not money-to-sit-on, not money-to-frighten-with. And finally when the pair leap into one of those radiant waltzes the Europeans know in their bones that their day is over.