But when I spoke a moment ago of the depicting of the disposition of fantastic sums of money I did not mean that the sums had necessarily to be large but that large or small the amounts had to be significant. In It Happened One Night Clark Gable is not interested in a $10,000 reward but he insists on beng reimbursed in the amount of $39.60, his figure fully itemized. The economic issues in these films, with all their ambivalence and irresolution, are invariably tropes for spiritual issues. (Which is not to deny that they can be interpreted the other way around too, the spiritual conflicts as tropes for the economic. These conflicts are bound up with the conflict over the direction of interpretation, the question, say, of what money, and how you get it, can make you do.) This is what we might expect of American romantic, or Utopian, works. The figure Gable claims is owed to him is of the same order as the figure, arrived at with similar itemization, Thoreau claimed to have spent in building his house, $ 28.12 1/2. The purpose of these men in both cases is to distinguish themselves, with poker faces, from those who do not know what things cost, what life costs, who do not know what counts. It is as essential for the settings of our films to be such that we can expect the characters in them to take the time, and take the pains, to converse intelligently and playfully about themselves and about one another as it is essential for the settings and characters of classical tragedy to be such that we can expect high poetry from them. Our critical task is to discover why they use their time as they do, why they say the things they say. Without taking up the details of the films we should not expect to know what they are, to know what causes them.