Fast-Talking Dames

“There is nothing like a dame,” proclaims the song from South Pacific. Certainly there is nothing like the fast-talking dame of screen comedies in the 1930s and ’40s. In this engaging book, film scholar and movie buff Maria DiBattista celebrates the fast-talking dame as an American original. Coming of age during the Depression, the dame—a woman of lively wit and brash speech—epitomized a new style of self-reliant, articulate womanhood. Dames were quick on the uptake and hardly ever downbeat...