What happened to our elites? Where did their Ciceronian Hochstube go?

The last years of British snobbism and old patrician, imperial culture caught and frozen in a little dialogue from 1949:

-- How can you just sit there?
-- Well, Mrs. Riordan, what else can I do? Are you sure that my pipe is not worrying you?
-- Is this really Scotland Yard in action?
-- Is that wheels in motion? Some of us are serving in a sitting way.

This could well be contrasted almost with any Soviet, proletarian movie. Hence the advantage of U.S. Empire and culture: its patricians learned and obtained sooner proletarian ways of talking and thinking (almost).

British movie by American blacklisted director Edward Dmytryk, 1949

at 1:18:30