The Spankings That Cinema Forgot: The 1930s

Our coverage of the decade begins counterintuitively, and in disregard of strict chronology, with a brace of spankings from 1933 that certainly didn’t happen.

The first film was called Hot Bullets. The story concerns neophyte attorney Ted Astrid, who is drawn into a plot to take revenge on the corrupt politician John Maurie, who had defrauded his now-dead father. Ted’s wife Helena begs him not to get involved, but he has already started. One of Maurie’s associates becomes interested in Helena, but when Ted tells her his suspicions, she becomes angry and threatens to leave him,

‘whereupon Ted turned her over his knee and administered the spanking he thought would bring her to her senses.’

She does leave, but Ted eventually wins her back and successfully breaks up Maurie’s racket.

That may sound fairly definite, but, as I said, it didn’t happen. If you were to look for Hot Bullets on IMDB, you wouldn’t find it, because the film was never made.

By now, cinema was a hungry maw, always in need of new scenarios. Talking Picture Magazine published thousands of prospective film stories, undertaking to negotiate deals between the writers and any interested producers. Hot Bullets, by Dorothy M. Hewlett, was offered in the January 1933 edition. At the other end of the year, the same publication presented Leslie A. Croutch’s Aboard a Comet, a tale of 4000 AD in which freethinking political prisoner Barry Keith is accidentally released from his Bolshevik cell by the violent arrival of a comet from outer space. Aboard the comet is green-eyed Princess Xona, who turns a death ray on him, only to find it doesn’t work on humans.

‘Barry advanced upon the dumbfounded royal lady and turning her upon his knee spanked her before her royal guard.’

It all ends happily (and matrimonially) for him and the Princess, but again the story didn’t get to Hollywood.

What these two unmade films illustrate is that there was an appetite for spanking scenes in the 1930s, a demand that outstripped supply even though 1933 was one of the peak years for movie spanking. That’s also reflected in the way various films were described in the press. A case in point is Bird of Paradise (1932), starring Dolores del Rio as the South Sea islander Luana

and famous for the nude swimming scene featuring her truly awesome glutes. The London Daily Mirror offered a precis of the story, in which she is romanced by visiting American Johnny Baker (Joel McCrea), including the following:

‘He is stopped by the shocked natives who tell him she is tabu to all except a native prince. The lady, however, has other ideas, and makes a bed of rose petals for her young man in a secluded glade, where the young couple are caught by the native elders and the fair damsel soundly spanked.’

No she isn’t! But Dolores del Rio herself wasn’t so lucky (as you can read about here).

Similarly, the Australian Women’s Weekly reported that the French actress Annabella ‘had to take a good spanking’ in the British film Wings of the Morning (1937).

Again, the short answer is, no, she didn’t.

The title makes it sound like an aviation movie, but Wings is actually the name of a racehorse. Annabella plays Maria, a gipsy girl who arrives in the film dressed as a boy. The hero, Kerry (Henry Fonda), thinks she really is one, and intends to ‘make a man’ of ‘him’ by throwing ‘him’ in the river; but first he rips all her clothes off and makes an embarrassing discovery. They take against one another, and he calls her a ‘spoiled brat’ – but takes it all back when he sees her in women’s clothes, and romance follows. So as the story is structured, there’s no point at which a spanking could feasibly happen – unless of course there was an alternate version in which it took the place of the ducking.

And there’s a direct contradiction in the case of Girl Without a Room (1933), a comedy about two Left-Bank artists in Paris. According to the Cincinnati Enquirer,

‘Before the film is over, one of the two achieves fame because a careless gallery attendant hangs a picture upside down, and the other has spanked the daughter of a man for whose revenge nothing save a duel will suffice.’

The artist in question is Crock (Charlie Ruggles), and the daughter is the Russian gold-digger Nada, played by Grace Bradley.

I avoided calling her the ‘spanked daughter’ for reasons that will start to emerge when I quote another review in the Springfield Leader and Press:

‘The Russian father is satisfied that he has avenged the insult to his daughter. As a matter of fact, Ruggles wasn’t trying to insult his daughter. He was only trying to give her a spanking, which she needed very badly.’

So, trying to spank rather than actually doing it. But the film itself contains no reference to spanking whatsoever, and what Crock was actually doing with Nada when the father burst in on them was wrestling on the floor, in the course of which he rips her skirt partly off, revealing her panties.

Nada does later get a kick on the bottom,

along with other indignities,

but not a spanking (even though the Springfield reviewer was right about her needing it). So far as we know, Grace Bradley got through the rest of her 11-year career without any more direct brush with spanking, but Ruggles later spanked Margaret Kerry, playing his daughter in the early ’50s sitcom The Ruggles.

This sort of thing means that we can’t be sure about newspaper reviews of films that we haven’t seen for ourselves, such as Disorderly Conduct (1932), in which Sally Eilers

plays Phyllis Crawford, described in the Richmond Times-Dispatch as ‘a very engaging young scapegrace’ who ‘has been spoiled by the sparing of the rod… As soon as she gets her long deferred spanking … she will settle down and become a praiseworthy citizen’. The available synopsis indicates that she gets arrested twice by the policeman hero and groped and slugged by the villains, but not spanked. (Sally Eilers herself was, however, in Sailor’s Luck the following year.)

And while the Hobart Mercury may declare that in Jimmy the Gent (1934) Joan Martin (Bette Davis) ‘got a good spanking at the hands of her hero,’ played by James Cagney, there’s no sign of it in any other account of the story, and anyone wanting to see Bette Davis over Cagney’s knee will have to be content with the Faux-TK scene in The Bride Came C.O.D. (1941) – which was itself promoted several times as a spanking, but isn’t one!

There are several points to make about this material. To begin with, there may be a mismatch between what we want from the reviews and what they are actually trying to do: we are looking for literal descriptions of what happens in films that, nearly a century later, we may not be able to see for ourselves; but the reviewers are trying to write in an engaging way about upcoming moviegoing opportunities, and may, in good faith, choose striking but figurative language with which to do so. And since some such statements are disprovable, when the opportunity to see the film comes up, there must necessarily be genuine uncertainty about others when we don’t have the same access.

I do mean uncertainty, the state of not knowing one way or the other. As a further illustration of the difficulty, let’s take another film I’ve never seen, Dangerously Yours (1933), and the way it was written up in the Adelaide News:

‘According to English law, a man is – or was – allowed to spank his wife so long as he did not use a stick thicker than his thumb. In film law, the trend is all for bigger and better spankings. Witness, the ultra-modern scene in Dangerously Yours: … Warner Baxter does not only spank Miriam Jordan; he puts chains on her. But it is all done in the spirit of high and up-to-date comedy.’

That’s a distinctively written, circumstantial account which tallies with direct evidence in the form of a photo from the set,

and also with the available plot synopsis, which refers to ‘a brawl’ preceding the ankle-chaining incident shown in the picture. But ultimately it all comes down to the fine detail of semantics and syntax as we try to interpret the statement, ‘Warner Baxter does not only spank Miriam Jordan; he puts chains on her.’ Does this mean he not only spanks her but also chains her, or does it mean that he does worse than merely spanking her? And if it is the ‘not only … but also’ formula, is ‘spanking’ a loose way of talking about the brawl or a precise way of describing something that happened in the course of it?

The second thing to observe about these reviewers’ remarks is the choice of vocabulary: even when it is certainly loose or metaphorical, the words still evoke a literal event, so that the journalists and their readers are imagining the ladies concerned being spanked even when what they are seeing is some other, less attractive kind of rough handling. Not only does that reinforce the point I made earlier about appetite, it also ties in with the way the studios’ publicists often got the idea of spanking into movie taglines, introducing a dimension of possibility even for films that don’t get anywhere near the act itself. We’ll now take some examples from across the decade.

The Brat (1931), starring Sally O’Neil (previously spanked in Don’t!) deals with a guttersnipe thief who is taken in by a wealthy novelist as a rags-to-riches social experiment. According to the newspaper ads:

‘And what a brat she is! You’ll want to spank her soundly!’

The Misleading Lady (1932) stars Claudette Colbert (later spanked in Bluebeard’s Eighth Wife).

She plays actress Helen Steele, who covets a role the producer doesn’t think she is capable of playing, and tries to persuade him by wagering that she can make mining engineer Jack Craigen (Edmund Lowe) fall in love with her within three days, despite the fact that she already has a fiancé. Craigen has just come back from a tour of duty in South America among the cannibals, who have rougher ways with women than prevail in the USA, so there’s the prospect of some robust treatment, albeit not what the ads seem to have in mind:

‘A He-man turns cave-man to save a good girl who needed a spanking.’

In Walking on Air (1936), another take on the familiar story of a father-daughter dispute concerning son-in-law identity, the feminine side of the argument, Kit Bennett, is played by Ann Sothern,

and Gene Raymond, who previously spanked Dolores del Rio in Flying Down to Rio (1933), is singer Pete Quinlan, whom she hires to persuade her father she could do worse than the fiancé she covets, a scheme which backfires but ends in marriage.

‘Gay, madcap romance… of a spoiled society girl who needed to be spanked… and the boy who elected himself to the job!!!’

And that goes a bit further than most of these lines towards the promise of some action, though as usual there’s no sign of it in the finished movie (and Pete can’t really be said to have ‘elected himself to the job’, either).

Janet Gaynor, previously spanked in Lucky Star (1929), takes the title role in Three Loves Has Nancy (1938): Nancy Briggs, stood up at her wedding by one suitor, who gets two more on the rebound. They are a pair of non-confirmed bachelor friends played by Franchot Tone and Robert Montgomery, who later spanked Betty Lynn in June Bride (1948), though it’s unclear whether it’s him or Tone’s character, Robert Hanson, who is most relevant this time round.

‘One wanted to kiss her, spank her and send her home…’

Neither says anything of the sort in the film, co-written by future Kiss Me Kate librettists Bella and Sam Spewack, but if spanking is meant to imply domesticity, that would seem to indicate Tone.

The musical Paris Honeymoon (1939) is set mainly in the Balkans rather than Paris, and features Franciska Gaal as local lovely Manya.

‘She’s a sweet little headache… and ought to be spanked!’

That references one of the songs in the film, addressed to Manya, which begins:

You’re a sweet little headache,
But you are lots of fun.
Maybe I ought to spank you,
Then thank you for all you’ve done.

‘She ought to be spanked’ is an easily-concurred-with judgment in view of the mayhem this ‘Balkanese brat’ causes when she falls in love with the film’s cowboy hero, Lucky Lawton (Bing Crosby), which includes breaking up his engagement and drugging both him and her rival with strong liquor. And it might have been a very pleasant spectacle, had it happened.

Which brings us back to the key point that these were scenes that people wanted to see, or at least enjoyed imagining, and the publicity taglines were designed to facilitate that rather than tell prospective moviegoers definitively that this was something they could actually expect for the price of admission.

But in the case of Smarty (1934), maybe the publicists’ imagination had gone a little too far into overdrive:

It’s a film entirely about the issue of whether a husband should ever hit his wife, starting off with an incident when Tony Wallace (Warren William) loses his temper with his wife Vickie and slaps her face during her birthday party. She is played by Joan Blondell, who was previously spanked in a publicity still for God’s Gift to Women (1931).

It’s also pertinent to mention next-door neighbor Nita, played by Claire Dodd, later spanked in In the Navy (1941).

She obviously has mixed feelings about what happened: she says Tony had no right to hit Vickie, but also that every woman should be hit once in a while, and keeps on smirking about it. In the course of the film, Vickie goes through two divorces and quite a lot of manhandling, which she clearly accepts and tacitly enjoys – but absolutely all of it, despite the overt implication of the ad, takes the form of slaps to her face.

This is one of those cases where there is such a blatant disconnect between how the movie was promoted and what actually happens in it, that one is left wondering whether something was changed between production and final release, but that nobody remembered to tell the publicists. Perhaps it’s pertinent that it’s only just a pre-Code movie: the Hays Code, which did so much to inhibit American cinema in the second half of the decade, came into full force on July 1, 1934, exactly six weeks after Smarty was released. In other words, it’s tempting to speculate that the movie was originally scripted, maybe even shot, to feature at least one spanking scene, but that it was toned down before the final release print, perhaps because the studio saw which way the wind was blowing.

Another case that invites this kind of speculation is Café Society (1939), starring Fred MacMurray, who later spanked Dorothy Lamour in And the Angels Sing (1944) and Paulette Goddard in a publicity still for Suddenly It’s Spring (1947). This time his co-star was Madeleine Carroll.

She plays the strangely named heiress Christopher West, who gets married to reporter Crick O’Bannon (MacMurray) for trivial reasons, only to discover that he in turn only married her to get a story. According to the publicity in Modern Screen, it is a marriage that ‘Might work … if the handsome husband uses the back of the hairbrush – diligently.’

That might seem like just another of the kind of spanking tagline we have been considering; but many contemporary reviews confirm the hint with direct statements. According to the New York Times,

‘It’s the same old yarn about the social butterfly who needed a spanking and got one from the strong-minded reporter she had married to win a bet.’

South Dakota’s Daily Plainsman gave a fuller account:

‘She is a spoiled brat of great wealth who deserves to be spanked and gets what she deserves. Fred MacMurray administers the spanking, being a mere news reporter with no respect for society. The chastisement knocks the gal off her high horse and she decides she loves the mud, thereby earning the gratitude of her old grandfather who had just about given up hope of her ever becoming a lady.’

And the London Evening Standard said that the working-out of the story gives Crick time

‘to spank her, to throw her into the sea, to drag her five miles on an aquaplane, to deliver cryptic morality lectures, and to behave generally in that extraordinary way demanded by such films before happiness between rich girl and poor boy can be gained.’

Most of the specific things mentioned there do actually happen in the film, but regrettably not the first of them. When they discover their mutually unsatisfactory motives for the marriage, she slaps his face and he slaps her right back. ‘He smacked me,’ she tells her grandfather afterwards. Fair enough, but he didn’t spank her.

You might think that all those reviewers were merely guilty of using the loosest of language, but another possibility emerges from the fact that, in this film, spanking isn’t just a passing misnomer.

Grandfather, played by Claude Gillingwater who put Colleen Moore across his knee in We Moderns fourteen years earlier, is a firm believer in the efficacy of spanking. He apologises to Crick in terms that begin to elide the distinction between smacking and spanking: ‘If I’d started smacking her earlier it wouldn’t have been necessary for you to do it.’ And later on he says that the West women need firm handling:

‘You know, Christopher’s grandmother was never any good until one night I spanked her with her own hairbrush. … And so after that she was alright, we had no more trouble with her.’

Put that ongoing theme together with the hairbrush publicity line and it starts to look just possible there might have been an earlier version of the script in which Crick did indeed spank Chris. There’s no room for that in the film as it stands: when he returns her slap, he says it makes them exactly even, which wouldn’t have been the case if his rejoinder to a slapped face were a spanked bottom; then he walks out, which leaves no opportunity for subsequent escalation. So a spanking could only have taken place in an earlier draft or an alternate version.

But the scriptwriter, Virginia Van Upp, certainly wasn’t averse to the subject: she went on to write the screenplays for One Night in Lisbon (1941), in which Madeleine Carroll does finally get her bottom smacked by Fred MacMurray, and Young and Willing (1943), with a full over-the-knee spanking scene. If she also wrote a spanking into Café Society, it’s not inconceivable that it might have found its way into the publicity press releases, and thence into the reviews (which were, of course, often merely previews by writers who hadn’t actually seen the films).

Censorship illustrates the obverse of the phenomenon I have been mainly describing so far: just as there were people who relished spanking scenes, so there were others who really didn’t want to see them, or allow anyone else to do so. There are a few more Kansas cases, both from 1930, including The Party Girl, a film denouncing what would later be called escort agencies, which had been ‘passed by the National Board of Review’, as audiences were assured by a note at the foot of the title slide. Among the incidental delights that didn’t trouble that Board was Diane Hoster (Marie Prevost) taking a phone booking while on a massage table, mainly below frame level to imply that she’s nearly nude, and wincing from time to time as the masseuse gets in a few hefty smacks on her bottom.

What did bother the state-level Board in Kansas was ‘man spanking posterior of girl on his lap and resting hand on same’. A viewing of the film reveals that what they were objecting to was this obviously appalling sight:

Which means that the similar ‘cut order’ in respect of The Bad One, starring Edmund Lowe and Dolores del Rio, probably didn’t refer to anything we would be altogether heartbroken to lose, however much we may disapprove of censorship on principle. At least, ‘Lowe spanks girl twice as she sits on couch on which he is reclining’ doesn’t sound like spanking in the purest sense of the word!

As an example of the lasting impact of this kind of intolerable impertinence, we’ll take the very minor Western Riding Speed (1934), directed by and starring Jay Wilsey (otherwise known as Buffalo Bill, Jr) as undercover border patrolman Steve Funney, and Joile Benet as rancher’s daughter Gypsy Vale.

He saves her from a car crash, for which she is somewhat ungrateful.

Later, she’s out riding and falls into a ravine from which she is unable to escape.

Steve finds her and attempts a rescue,

but falls in himself, meaning they are both trapped at the bottom of the ravine. She rebukes him for his temerity in attempting to save her life a second time,

and so he spanks her – which has the usual aphrodisiac effect. Or, as one available synopsis rather awkwardly puts it, she ‘is now in love with the spanking stranger’. But this change of heart is mysterious in the surviving print that’s available on DVD, because, tragically, the scene has been snipped!

So the climate was contradictory, for and against spanking scenes, meaning that studios and directors swung both ways on the issue. On May 15, 1937, reporter Harrison Carrol was visiting the set of Saratoga at MGM. It starred Clark Gable, a once and future spanker in Forsaking All Others (1934) and Across the Wide Missouri (1951), and Jean Harlow,

who plays Carol Clayton, the ‘high and mighty’ daughter of a wealthy stud owner. The first thing Gable’s character, bookmaker Duke Bradley, says about her is, ‘That brat needs a good spanking.’

The scene Harrison Carrol saw being filmed was an argument between Bradley and Miss Clayton, in which she wrongfully accuses him of cheating her family out of their property. Bradley tells her, ‘Is that all, before I reach for that hairbrush?’ And so, said Carrol, ‘We settle back to see Harlow get the spanking,’ but then the director called:

‘CUT!’

It’s a picturesque story, but doesn’t reflect what actually happens in the film, where Carol Clayton gets not only to the end of the scene but, more importantly, out of the room, without the hairbrush getting anywhere near her rear end. The action doesn’t cut out before an offscreen spanking – no spanking actually happens, even though the prospect is clearly telegraphed by multiple advance references.

On the other hand, sometimes opportunities came unexpectedly, and were not eschewed. Our case in point is Daughters Courageous (1939), the second of the Warner Brothers ‘Daughters’ series of comedies. Three of the Masters sisters are played by the Lane sisters, Lola, Rosemary, later spanked in All By Myself (1943), and Priscilla, previously spanked in Love, Honor and Behave (1938).

It’s Priscilla’s character, Buff Masters, who provides the opportunity by exuberantly sliding down the banisters just as Penny the maid (May Robson) is coming to the foot of the stairs to call up announcing a visitor. As the scene was scripted, Penny simply registers her disapproval verbally, but when it was shot, they discovered that Priscilla didn’t have time to get off the banister before May arrived at the foot of the stairs. And so, according to an eye-witness:

‘Not being one to suppress her impulses, Miss Robson delivered a fairly sound slap to the most spankable portion of Priscilla’s anatomy.’

The other two Lane sisters enjoyed it a lot, we are told, but the person whose opinion mattered was the director. He was Michael Curtiz, whose work to date included the aforementioned Jimmy the Gent and also Dodge City (1939, with spanking threat to Olivia de Havilland), and who would go on to direct not only Casablanca (1942) but also The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex (1939, with incidental smacked bottom for Bette Davis’ Queen Elizabeth) and The Vagabond King (1956, with fullscale spanking for Rita Moreno). And on the Daughters Courageous set, he decided that the smack made the scene funnier, so it was left in. It may not have been ‘a good sound spanking’, as the publicity put it, but it still made a welcome addition to the film!

And what’s more, there are likely to be a few more honest-to-goodness spanking scenes waiting to be discovered in 1930s cinema. Here’s a picture from an as yet unidentified movie of 1932:

And we’ll finish on a little mystery, a photo published in July 1939, showing Patsy Kelly being spanked by Jack Oakie (who had previous spanking experience both on screen and radio), with the assistance of Stuart Erwin (who spanked Dorothy Appleby in Small Town Boy):

The trouble is, these three can’t be placed in the same movie, or even the same studio, and Jack Oakie isn’t credited on even a single picture in 1939. So what’s the context? A completely unknown film, or three actors larking around together somewhere in Hollywood?

There’ll be more larks, on and off celluloid, when we pass on to the 1940s in the next installment of this series.