Fast-Talking Dames

By Maria DiBattista

Book Overview

"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. They seemed to know what to say and when to say it. In their fast and breezy talk seemed to lie the secret of happiness, but also the key to reality. DiBattista offers vivid portraits of the grandest dames of the era, including Katharine Hepburn, Irene Dunne, Rosalind Russell, Barbara Stanwyck, and others, and discusses the great films that showcased their compelling way with words--and with men.

With their snappy repartee and vivid colloquialisms, these fast-talkers were verbal muses at a time when Americans were reinventing both language and the political institutions of democratic culture. As they taught their laconic male counterparts (most notably those appealing but tongue-tied American icons, Gary Cooper, Henry Fonda, and James Stewart) the power and pleasures of speech, they also reimagined the relationship between the sexes.
In such films as Bringing Up Baby, The Awful Truth, and The Lady Eve, the fast-talking dame captivated moviegoers of her time. For audiences today, DiBattista observes, the sassy heroine still has much to say.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0300099037
• ISBN13: 9780300099034
• Release Date: March 2003
• Publisher: Yale University Press
• Length: 384 Pages
• Weight: 1.16 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 6.1" x 9.2"

Customer Reviews

Nostalgia with fine women actors

This book discusses the role of women in film, particularly those women from the earlier years of film that were fast-talking and smart. This is a great record of how film tried to sneak intelligent women into their movies, even though society at the time dictated that women should be docile and silent.A great analysis of women and their roles in United States history.

The Fast-Talking Women of Comedy

Maria DiBattista, in Fast-Talking Dames, looks at the women (Jean Harlow, Carole Lombard, Ginger Rogers, Myrna Loy, Jean Arthur, Claudette Colbert, Katharine Hepburn, Irene Dunne, Rosalind Russell, Barbara Stanwyck, and, even, Great Garbo) who helped create a new woman, a dame as it were, in screen comedy in the late thirties until the mid-forties. This woman relied on her voice for her wit and her power and the author does a very good job of looking at the effect and originality of this voice in the beginning of the book. The text can veer into over-analyzing at times, particulary in the chapters devoted to just one movie, but that is part of the charm of a film studies book. It will make one look a little longer and lot more carefully at these comic screen gems in the future. Anyone interested in screwball comedy will enjoy this book whether they agree with all the conclusions or not. The text may get a little bogged with a heavy scholar's hand but the material being studied always helps the lighten the load. An interesting addition to film studies books.