The Spankings That Cinema Forgot: The 1940s

Our survey of the spanking dribs and drabs of the silver screen now reaches the war decade, and our first task is simply to record a rumored spanking publicity still with Carole Landis for Road Show (1941), in which she plays the independent-minded carnival owner Penguin Moore.

There’s nothing remotely relevant in the film itself, and at this time Carole was trying to avoid being too much associated with cheesecake pics, which she thought incompatible with being considered a serious actress; so it’s quite possible that the alleged publicity photo is nothing more than somebody’s (understandable) wishful thinking.

i can’t be sure whether the same is true of our next case, also from 1941, because I haven’t actually seen the film, and any who have done may perhaps not have been able to follow the precise detail of the story, because it’s in Swedish. The title, Landstormens Lilla Argbigga, translates roughly as ‘The Home Guard’s Little Shrew’, and no doubt refers to spoiled Marianne Norrenius (Sickan Carlsson),

who joins the army reserves, and is one of the group assigned to her neighbor and admirer Viktor (George Fant) to be taught military discipline. The whisper is that there was also some less military discipline, administered with a riding crop in the over-the-knee position, and it is indeed the right kind of scenario for that; but with no available video, no photo and nothing definite in any contemporary commentary I’ve seen, the only thing is to add the film to the watch list and hope for more and better information in due course.

In October 1941, we have a slightly more definite informant, though not necessarily a more reliable one, in a correspondent to movie journalist Louella Parsons who signed himself ‘Aggravated’. What was he aggravated about? Intrusive incidental music!

‘Why is it that emotion on the screen is inevitably accompanied by a symphony orchestra? If “Lydia” grieves over a lost lover in the privacy of her boudoir – it sounds as if Stokowski was suddenly turned loose in the background; “Tarzan” bags a tiger to the strains of Wagner; and Jimmy Stewart spanks Lana Turner to the wafting melody of the “concerto”. If life would only be as kind and turn on the music when the income tax comes due!’

Never mind Lydia and Tarzan; the third example must refer to Ziegfeld Girl, released six months earlier, in which Gilbert Young and his girlfriend Sheila Regan are played by James Stewart and Lana Turner in their only film together.

She’s head-hunted from her job as a lift attendant to appear in one of impresario Florenz Ziegfeld’s shows, and he objects when she attracts a rich admirer after the first night. Eventually she’s a kept woman and their engagement’s off – a process that does indeed involve sentimental backing music, but sadly no spanking at all. So ‘Aggravated’s letter is interesting not as a tipoff to a hitherto unknown screen spanking, but for the way he seems to have thought of it as a standard romantic scenario that might be overlaid on the actual (and different) circumstances of the picture in question.

In Emergency Landing (1941), the ultra-callipygean Carol Hughes (soon to be spanked in a publicity still for Under Fiesta Stars) plays Betty Lambert, another spoiled society girl who takes against test pilot Jerry Barton (Forrest Tucker), who is trying to get her father, an aviation tycoon, to manufacture a robot-controlled airplane. In the course of the story, Betty tries to drive to Hollywood against her father’s wishes, but lack of gas leaves her stranded at Jerry’s desert weather bureau. This means, as one early review puts it, that he ‘gets a chance to give the girl the spanking she deserves’.

Sounds promising… What actually happens is that Jerry wires Betty’s father: ‘With your permission think can teach your daughter much needed lesson. Please answer immediately…’ The answer comes back: ‘Go to it. Betty needs discipline.’ Still promising… but it turns out that the reviewer was just being metaphorical about the spanking. What literally happens is that Betty is… made to do housework! Later on, her aunt (Evelyn Brent) tells her, ‘I ought to spank your…’, breaking off before direct mention of the beauteous target area, but nothing comes of it, alas.

But there actually is a spanking in There’s One Born Every Minute (1942). Well, almost…

It’s a comedy about advertising and politics, with a layer of supernatural fantasy in the form of a ‘living’ portrait of a family ancestor, Claudius Twine (Hugh Herbert), who is a recurring presence bestowing benign advice on his descendants. These include Helen Twine, played by Peggy Moran (also spanked in a publicity still for her last film but one, Treat ‘Em Rough).

Helen’s love-life, torn between her current and former boyfriends Lester Caldwalader (Scott Jorden) and Jimmy Hanagan (Tom Brown), provides a major strand of the plot. Despite ample evidence of Helen’s present antipathy to Jimmy, Lester becomes jealous, and the conversation ends up like this:

LESTER: If you don’t stop talking, I’ll turn you over my knee.
HELEN: You and who else?
(She slaps his face.)

He insists that she must decide between him and Jimmy, and the upshot is that she walks out on him, wanting neither of them nor indeed any man at all.

Jimmy gets into some difficulty over a dubious advertising campaign, but is ultimately justified, and Helen’s father is elected mayor despite political skulduggery by Lester’s father. So all is on course for a happy ending, with only Helen’s romantic life left unresolved. The victorious Mayor Twine tells Jimmy there’s something he needs to do, and whispers it in his ear. When Jimmy demurs, Twine says, ‘What are you, man or mouse?’ Jimmy decides he’s a man and goes off to the Twine family residence to do as has been suggested, which entails carrying Helen bodily over to the couch,

and putting her across his knee.

‘This has been coming to you for a long time,’ he tells her. But then the picture cuts to Claudius’ portrait on the wall, and we only hear 13 hard smacks before the sound fades down. Claudius observes:

‘One guy threatens to spank her and she pins a haymaker on him. The other guy actually does it and she falls in his arms.’

It is effectively the last moment of the film: he then goes off to play piano with a lady ghost and the ‘THE END’ caption comes up.

The next case is a strange one concerning The Forest Rangers (1942), ostensibly about ranger Don Stuart (Fred MacMurray) and his efforts to catch an arboreal arsonist, but actually about an ongoing catfight over him between his new wife Celia (Paulette Goddard) and his unrequitedly adoring work colleague Tana (Susan Hayward).

In a syndicated column published after the film was made but a month before it was released, Hedda Hopper wrote about male/female violence in the movies, and argued on the basis of seven examples (four from films that had not yet come out) that the ‘balance sheet’ was more or less even between the sexes. This was the case with The Forest Rangers as she described it:

‘Paulette Goddard, responding to the romantic urge, turns a fire hose on Fred MacMurray – and later he spanks her.’

But neither of these things actually happens in the film.

The role of Celia was originally intended for Madeleine Carroll, continuing her sparky pairing with MacMurray that never quite got as far as a spanking. She pulled out on medical advice to take a rest, and was replaced by Paulette Goddard, who had been originally cast as Tana, and who came to the production with two spanking scenes already on her CV (in North West Mounted Police and Reap the Wild Wind). Celia’s the usual wayward, thrill-seeking rich girl whom Don marries unconventionally early in the picture, and is advised by her father not to let her get away with anything. She becomes the usual fish out of water in the logging camp where Don is working, constantly blundering into trouble by disregarding his instructions.

What she doesn’t do is turn a fire hose on him; in fact, fire hoses barely feature before the climactic forest fire sequence. He does get soaked through her disobedience, though, in a good comedy sequence where she tries to follow him across a load of logs rolling free in the water, and he has to rescue her, but falls in himself. And he doesn’t spank her, or even manhandle her much, except when she finds her nailed boots stuck to the floor and he lifts her free.

But there is a marital quarrel towards the end of the film when she uses her father’s influence to get him what she considers to be a better job out east, so that she can take him away from Tana. In the aftermath, she is seen lying face down on her bed in the usual position of a soundly spanked girl…

which is not to say that anything of the sort has happened to her, of course. But the Hedda Hopper account is so specific about the incidents that one is compelled to wonder whether they might be deleted or alternative scenes from an earlier, superseded version of The Forest Rangers, rather than being merely the product of a gossip columnist’s overactive imagination. Such things did happen: later on there will be another example of how films developed during production, gaining and losing scenes rather than being predetermined by a script that was fixed before the cameras had begun to roll.

By the time the cameras rolled on the romantic period drama Saratoga Trunk in 1943, a spanking scene had already been eliminated. It featured the white British actress Flora Robson,

who played the black maid Angelique (in blackface make-up, which, though considered distasteful today, was a commonplace and unremarkable performance practice back then). She was due to be spanked by the hero, Clint Maroon, played by Gary Cooper. Five years earlier, he had demurred at spanking Claudette Colbert in Bluebeard’s Eighth Wife and had to be cajoled by Miss Colbert herself, but this time round there was a different reported reason why the scene was dropped: the main thread of the plot was Clint’s amours with Angelique’s mistress, Clio (Ingrid Bergman), and the studio, Warner Brothers, felt that this would be compromised if he were to do anything remotely romantic with the maid – and spanking could come under that heading, remember.

(The film was, incidentally, completed in June 1943 but then shelved until 1946 to make room for Warner’s to release patriotic war films instead.)

There are rumors that Roy Rogers spanks Dale Evans in Utah (1945).

He doesn’t, but the possibility is mentioned, and the story might have been a whole lot simpler if he had…

Dale plays Chicago singer Dorothy Bryant, who is rehearsing for a musical, Strictly from Dixie, which has all the hallmarks of a smash hit but turns out not to have the necessary financial backing.

To raise money to put into the show, she proposes to sell the Bar X, a Utah ranch she has inherited from her grandfather. She travels out west with her fellow showgirls and tells her plans to the ranch manager, who is named as well as played by Roy Rogers. He and his associate Gabby Whittaker (Gabby Hayes) don’t care for the plan, and Gabby offers Roy some advice:

GABBY: She’s a female ain’t she? City-bred or country-bred, they’re all alike. Take her over your knee!
ROY: I’ve got a picture of me taking her over my knee. She’s got spirit. You can’t outfight her, you’ve got to outsmart her.

And the burden of the plot is how the outsmarting catastrophically backfires: they switch signs to make her believe Gabby’s run-down place is her ranch; as a result she is induced to sell the real Bar X to a fraudster for far less than its true value, and Roy has a lot of trouble putting matters to rights. So he’d have been better off giving her a spanking!

Shirley Temple was spanked with a hairbrush in a set of publicity stills for Kiss and Tell (1945) and threatened with a spanking in The Bachelor and the Bobby-Soxer (1947), but she seems to have gotten even closer to some screen action in the film she made in between, Honeymoon (1947). She plays Barbara Olmstead, who is attempting a rendezvous in Mexico City with her serviceman fiancé Phil Vaughn (Guy Madison). When he doesn’t arrive, she seeks help from the American consul David Flanner (Franchot Tone), and finds herself falling for him. According to a press report from the set:

‘To snap her out of this temporary phase, Madison is required to grab her and as she struggles, whirl her around and over his knee for a good old-fashioned spanking. But Madison, shy and obviously afraid he may hurt the tiny star, treats her like a fragile flower. “You can’t hurt me, grab me like this,” Shirley says. And before he realizes what is happening she has applied a jiu-jitsu hold and tossed him head over heels.’

Everyone found this so funny that the director decided to include the throw in the scene – but with the comeback that Phil, as a soldier, also knows jiu-jitsu,

which means that Barbara still ends up across his knee, and the spanking proceeds as originally intended.

Only not in the final release print. Watch the film and what you’ll see is quite a similar scene, only with two key differences. The first is that the man involved is David Flanner, not Phil Vaughn: he finally loses his temper after Barbara’s attentions cause him trouble with both his diplomatic superiors and his fiancée, and when she will not listen to reason, tells her,

‘Young lady, it won’t even be partial reparation for what you’ve done to me, but I’m going to do something your parents obviously neglected. I’m going to spank some sense into you.’

There follows a chase around the table, then a cutaway to Phil outside hearing her cries of distress. He bursts into the room just in time to see David taking the jiu-jitsu fall (rather than, as some will no doubt have hoped, Barbara taking the spanking); and because he’s a diplomat, not a soldier, he doesn’t have the same combat training as Phil, nor the same chance to come out on top. And that’s the second difference: no spanking. Barbara flees, Phil pursues and confronts her, and then we get what looks like an alternative option to the reported spanking scene: Barbara tries and fails to throw Phil, and he responds by lifting her over his shoulder and tossing her into the swimming pool.

‘It’s just an old American custom,’ beams David as he watches. You can imagine just the same reaction if Phil were spanking Barbara. And then the picture ends with a brief view of Barbara and Phil at the altar.

Exactly what we make of this depends fundamentally on whether we believe the press report. A pertinent factor is that it was published in June 1947, a month after the film was released and a whole year after principal photography wrapped. So was it an old eye-witness report published in good faith even though changes had subsequently been made, or a publicity taradiddle that could be easily discredited by simply buying a ticket to see the film? We have no way of knowing, but the best-case scenario is that the original ending featured Phil spanking Barbara as described, and this evolved during production – and in that connection, perhaps it’s relevant that additional (or replacement?) scenes were shot in September 1946, several months after the main shooting period.

We have previously had occasion to observe that, in respect of screen spankings, Linda Darnell led a charmed life.

Not so her male co-stars on the historical romance Forever Amber (1947), in which she played the promiscuous heroine Amber St Clair: the publicity department spun the angle that it was an accident- and illness-prone set, with Cornell Wilde catching a cold, Richard Greene getting bruised after tripping over his own sword, Glenn Langen falling off a horse and hurting his back, Gilchrist Stuart getting a broken nose. And as for Leo G. Carroll…

He plays Goodgroome, Amber’s puritanical adoptive father. According to the publicity story, he got his injury, a broken arm, ‘as he tried to reach Linda to administer a spanking’.

This pertains to the opening scene when Amber defies Goodgroome’s plans for her marital future. He sends her to her room, then tells his wife that he has had enough of her ‘vain ways’ and ‘sinful pride’: he will make her behave like his daughter, ‘if it means the skin off her back entire’. Mrs Goodgroome persuades him not to use the whip, and in the event he doesn’t even use his hand: the spanking, whether attempted or actual, didn’t make the final cut, and then Goodgroome is left behind as Amber quickly absconds to a livelier life in fashionable London.

Another uncertain anecdote from a movie set saw print in August 1947, towards the end of production on My Girl Tisa (1948), set in 1905 New York and starring Lilli Palmer (who a few years later tried and failed to launch a Broadway production of The Little Hut, in which she would have been spanked).

In the film she plays Tisa Kepes, an immigrant from Eastern Europe, who has to slave at multiple low-pay jobs to support herself while waiting for the chance of getting American citizenship. One day, the story goes, she was called to rehearse by director Elliot Nugent (who previously spanked Martha Raye during the making of Never Say Die). The particular scene he wanted to work on was one in which Tisa gets spanked. Lilli asked him to wait until she had changed out of her slacks and into costume, to which he pointed out that, as it was only a rehearsal, she didn’t actually need the costume. ‘That’s what you think!’ retorted Lilli, and when she returned, added, ‘See what I mean?’ She was now in a full period gown – with bustle!

The truth is that the impoverished Tisa doesn’t wear a bustle in the film, and in any event the closest she gets to a spanking is the following from Stella Adler:

Next up is an extract from a column by Hollywood gossip Harold Heffernan, published in November 1947 and previewing a scene in Big City (1948), the exact title of which is the more minor of the two mistakes in the first sentence:

‘Deadpan Virginia O’Brien gets spanked for a scene in The Big City. This low backslapping could result in her showing some emotion on the screen – a famous “first” indeed.’

This seems to be mainly an excuse for an ungallant snark at Miss O’Brien.

The disappointing fact is that she wasn’t in Big City, and therefore couldn’t be spanked in it. (She was on the point of taking an enforced career break when MGM didn’t renew her contract.) Heffernan had misheard or misremembered that one of the Big City stars was 11-year-old Margaret O’Brien (and I don’t feel the slightest inclination to find out whether or not she was spanked).

In Hazard (1948), Paulette Goddard plays gambling addict Ellen Crane who wagers her hand in marriage and loses – but then tries to welch on the deal. MacDonald Carey is J.D. Storm, the detective who’s hired to bring her back, and the progress of his assignment is detailed in the pictorial parabola across the newspaper advert:

You may welcome a closer look at the salient part:

And a better look at the publicity still that lies behind it:

It also made the title card, reversed into right-handedness:

But of course it’s not really a spanking in the strict sense of the word, so really that’s as much of our attention as it’s going to get!

For Them That Trespass (1949) is a post-Brighton Rock slice-of-lowlife British crime melodrama in which Christy Drew (Stephen Murray), a young would-be playwright from the middle classes, feels he needs experience of the raw, rough, real world. To that end, he starts drinking in plebeian bars and falls in with a bad crowd. For our purposes, what happens to him as a result is beside the point. What matters is that he is the unwitting catalyst for a bar fight between two young women, Frankie Ketchen (Rosalyn Boulter) and Olive Mockson (Vida Hope).

Vida Hope

The outcome has more than a whiff of Zola’s L’Assommoir: Olive finds herself bent over a table, has her skirt ripped off and then…

We end on the cusp of a new decade with The Reformer and the Redhead, made in the fall of 1949 but not released until May 1950. The redhead of the title is Kathy Maguire, a role originally intended for Lana Turner but ultimately played by June Allyson,

who had spankings to look forward to in Too Young to Kiss (1951) and a publicity still for the 1957 remake of My Man Godfrey, and also had one in prospect as The Reformer and the Redhead geared up for production.

The film is partly a screwball comedy, partly a light political drama: Bringing Up Baby meets Mr Smith Goes to Washington, if you like, though it’s not nearly as good a movie as either. In Kathy’s first scene with her father Kevin Maguire (Cecil Kellaway), he asks her, ‘Will you ever learn to control that temper?’ She doesn’t: after he is fired from his job as a zookeeper because he objects to a new display of hunting trophies belonging to corrupt politician John Parker (Ray Collins), she gets into a fist-fight with his niece (Kathleen Freeman) which lands her in court. To get out of an apparently open-and-shut case, she hires as her lawyer Andrew Hale (Dick Powell), a reforming mayoral candidate, and so the romancing begins…

At the end of August, when the movie was about to go into production, the Los Angeles Times reported that in one scene Cecil Kellaway ‘is impelled … to spank his daughter soundly’. Sadly this wound up being dropped from the finished movie, in which Allyson and Kellaway have very little screen time together; there’s much more emphasis on the developing relationship between Kathy and Hale, capitalizing on the fact the actors were also a couple offscreen. Whether the spanking ever made it onto celluloid, or else was abandoned in those final pre-production weeks, is something that remains unknown.

And with that, we close the book on the 1940s, and look forward to a new decade’s worth of uncertainty and disappointment!

Acknowledgement: Thanks to Victor for improving the translation of the Swedish title, soon after this article was first published.