Nice Work If You Can Get It: Office Romances on Film (opens in new tab)

Women’s hands dance over typewriter keys. The percussive racket they make, like the tapping of an unruly chorus line, takes the place of music during the opening credits of The Office Wife (1930), which appear over a montage of female typists. The film then begins with a smooth tracking shot past rows of desks where smartly dressed young women are working, in the kind of bright, spacious modern office—with its cheerful hubbub of phones and buzzers and clacking keys, its art-deco lettering on ...