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This chapter explores and introduces one of the most impressive and influential creations of the talkies—the momentous yet underappreciated sexual and social revolution that occurred when movies acquired the power of speech—the fast-talking dame. One example of such a dame is Claudette Colbert, played by Edwina Corday, in It's a Wonderful World. The film relates Guy Johnson's—played by James Stewart—experience of reevaluating dames from the neck up. After such an experience with Claudette, Guy sees a dame as a brainy marvel. Damehood, then, is a distinction reserved for the quick-witted as well as the attractive. A pretty faces therefore has no claims on damehood, and brains have an equal part in the allure of the fast-talking speech. This chapter thus explores the persona of the fast-talking dame and how the persona emerged in American and movie culture.

This chapter takes a closer look at the personalities and celebrities that would epitomize and popularize the character of the blonde bombshell, namely: Jean Harlow, Carole Lombard, and Ginger Rogers. It looks at, for example, Nothing Sacred (1937) where Hazel Flagg—played by Lombard—carries the banner for modern American womanhood. The fast-talking dame, in a sense, looks towards democratic society's ideology that boasts of endless opportunities for self-advancement and translates this ideology into modern parlance. She speaks of the language of the times as quick and unforgiving, and at the same time she also expresses the fluid, unstable character of American society during a period of drastic change. The chapter thus analyzes and expounds on the character of the fast-talking dame and sees how this incorporates into the blond bombshell persona, further exploring such a dame in the personas of the characters played by Harlow, Lombard, and Rogers.

This chapter concludes the insights exposed by this book regarding the character and influence that fast-talking dames had on American culture and society. It explores, for one, the slowing and dumbing down of the American comic heroine, the demise of the fast-talking dame coming by the early 1950s. It looks at the still snappy but strangely dispirited comedies of the postwar era, where there is a shift in national mood. It looks at, for one, Claudette Colbert's combating of the sexual ideology of the home front in Without Reservations (1946), as well as Bette Davis's eloquent yet self-annulling “confession” in a stalled car as Margo Channing in All About Eve. Here she expresses that the reason for her disgraceful behavior is because she can never be what she wants to be—young and helpless and feminine. Thus, this chapter ends the commemoration of another kind of dialogue, one paced by the give and take of the fast-talking dame making her way into the world.

This chapter first looks at the legacy that the fast-talking dame created. Film critic André Bazin assessed such a legacy by first appreciating the idea that American comedy “was the most serious genre in Hollywood—in the sense that it reflected...the deepest moral and social beliefs of American Life.” In that respect, it was the fast-talking dame that best articulated the nature of those beliefs and their moral claim on us. This chapter thus looks at the language that was inherent in American comedies at the time. Novelist, screenwriter, and reviewer Penelope Gilliatt, for one, praised these films for being able to develop a comic language that was at the same time incredibly accurate and serious in its topics of discussion.

This chapter takes a deeper look at the comic symbolism behind the dame's hair color. Anita Loos's famous formulation of hair color to sexual destiny follows the notion that gentlemen may prefer blondes, but marry brunettes. The brunette is taken as the dame who not only enters into marriage, but seems to redefine it. The chapter thus looks at and compares the characters of blondes and brunettes, and gleams on each one's takes on marriage. In the case of the blondes: marriage for Harlow is desirable due to its association with respectability and economic security—it is exploited for her needs. For Lombard, marriage is a field of play. For Rogers, her portrayal as a bachelor mother was her most radical challenge to America's social imagination. In response, it looks at Myrna Loy, Jean Arthur, and Claudette Colbert and sees how their brunette characters played into the notion of the fast-talking dame.

This chapter takes a closer look at Irene Dunne, the fast-talking dame most in peril of lapsing into a soft-spoken lady. It studies her characters in movies such as My Favorite Wife, Back Street, Ann Vickers, and Show Boat, wherein she often played women who could be all-in-all to their chosen mates. This is seen only to be possible because she was her own good company, sufficient, if need to, unto herself, creating an emotional paradox that is shown most directly in My Favorite Wife. In that same film, she consolidates all the possible relations a man might have to a woman—“No man could ask for a better companion, a truer friend, or a more charming playmate.” If a moral were to be attached to a reissue of her films, it might read something like: She loves best and longest who can live, if need be, a life apart. Thus, this chapter explores the characters of Irene Dunne in an attempt to gleam the social implications and influences that her roles would have on the American womanhood.

This chapter looks at Preston Sturges's accomplished study of America's finest comic specimen: sucker sapiens, in the film The Lady Eve. In it, heroine Jean Harrington (Barbara Stanwyck) is a fast-talking dame never at a loss for a word or a palmed card, whereas the hero, Charles “Hopsie” Pike (Henry Fonda) has a shy demeanor and halting speech, making him an easy mark for Jean. The end of the film concludes with a paradoxical moral: the hero must be swindled in order to be enriched, venturing all chances for happiness on a gambler, a dissembler, and a sexual cheat. This is seen as a moral that needs to be impressed upon the American character, whose faith in democratic manners is attached to the belief that moral innocence is ultimately superior to cunning, that the plainspoken are valued over the quick-witted. The Lady Eve, then, is Sturges's exposition of the naivete that authorizes such a disingenuous view of how the world works and how people are formed within it.

This chapter explores and analyzes the film, His Girl Friday, which starred Hildy Johnson, perhaps the fastest of the fast-talking dames of American screen comedy. Hildy is the one that made American aware of how “talking pictures” gave women the chance to speak up, speak out, and speak to their own desires, dreams, and ambitions. The chapter goes deep into Hildy's character as a newspaperman, and discusses how the character of Hildy would spring a new female type. As the main business of comedy at the time was to show the aspects that make a successful human being, happy in both work and play, sexually and professionally fulfilled, the comedies of the 1930s and 1940s show that such possibilities for women to obtain sexual happiness and professional success required them to veer away from the slow-witted, reticent, or inarticulate character. This chapter examines what insights can be gained from Hildy's character in His Girl Friday.