Our first case of the new decade is Louisa (1950), in which Ronald Reagan plays family man Hal Norton. His mother, Louisa (Spring Byington), has a late-life romance with a grocer, Henry Hammond, and ends up the object of rivalry between the grocer and his (Norton’s) boss, Mr Burnside; her amours parallel the behavior of adolescent girls, including her own granddaughter, Cathy, who is herself having boyfriend trouble. She’s played by Piper Laurie, who was later spanked in The Prince who was a Thief (1951).
The story, as told by Piper herself to several different reporters a few years later, goes that Reagan asked her out on a date after work one day, and that she was amused to be squired around town by a man who had spanked her only four hours earlier, as part of a scene in the film. She also said that, before they parted that night, she gave him ‘a polite smack’ in return for the spanking.
If we fact-check this, the first thing to say is that Ronald Reagan was between marriages at the time of making the film: he and Jane Wyman (whom he had spanked in Tugboat Annie Sails Again back in 1940) were divorced six months earlier, and it was two years before he married Nancy Davis. So it would not be implausible for him to be dating just then, though it is also worth remembering that he was not only playing, but also actually old enough to be, her father: at 18 years old, she was less than half his age. In her autobiography, Learning to Live Out Loud (2011), Piper Laurie confirms that Reagan took an interest in her during the filming, and also that the studio bosses didn’t think it was quite proper, though she doesn’t say anything about the spanking.
There’s no spanking scene in the finished film. Hal is harassed by the impact of his mother’s behavior and takes it out on his children. Their biggest confrontation comes towards the end of the film when Louisa disappears (after reading a detective agency report procured by Burnside which suggests that his rival is a serial bigamist), and Cathy ties up the phone talking to her boyfriend Jimmy, then tells her father he’s being melodramatic. A spanking would be consistent with his impulsive characterization (the film begins with him coming home with gifts for the entire family after he gets a promotion), but it wouldn’t be a vital moment nor, arguably, merited by Cathy. That might, of course, explain why it isn’t in the film: in all likelihood, they shot the scene but decided it didn’t work in the context of the overall story, and the footage hit the cutting room floor.
We previously encountered columnist Harold Heffernan indulging in baseless speculation about the spanking of Virginia O’Brien in a movie she never appeared in. He returns to our attention with a newspaper article, syndicated in the fall of 1951, about the different and inventive ways that screenwriters set up ‘boy meets girl’ romantic encounters. One of his examples was the high-budget medieval adventure The Black Rose (1950), starring Tyrone Power as Walter, the educated but illegitimate English hero who joins a caravan journeying to far Cathay and en route meets the heroine Maryam, played by Cécile Aubrey, who was spanked offscreen in her next film, Barbe-Bleue (Bluebeard; 1951).
According to Heffernan, this is how boy meets girl:
‘Tyrone Power first thought Cécile Aubrey was a native Arabian boy and he became irked and started to give the “lad” a spanking. Only then did he discover Cécile was far from masculine.’
Luckily for Cécile, and unhappily for us, that’s another load of rubbish Heffernan foisted on his readers. What actually happens is that Walter is asked to help Maryam, known for no good reason as the Black Rose, and is also advised that he needs to take on a second boy servant. He spots straight away that the boy and the girl under discussion are one and the same, with no need for spanking – or indeed disrobing.
I haven’t seen The Strip-Tease Murder Case (1950) and, even if I had, I couldn’t be sure I’d seen the whole of it: one early review mentioned that its running time was likely to be different in different states. In other words, not all of the film would necessarily make it past the various local censorship boards. We know that one particular part of the film fell to the censor’s scissors in Kansas: ‘man slaps girl dancer on posterior’. It was probably marginal, but all the same…
Next, meet Beverly Michaels.
Rumor has it that she was spanked in the uncomfortable semi-noir drama Pickup (1951).
She plays the unscrupulous, mercenary Betty, who marries an older man, Jan Horack (Hugo Haas), with a view to cheating him of his money, only to learn that she has no case for divorce and can only get her hands on the cash by becoming his widow. Setting about to arrange this, she lies that Jan is a wife-beater in the hope of provoking her lover Steve (Allan Nixon) into protective reprisals. So there it is: beating, not spanking, and untrue to boot.
Hugo Haas not only starred in Pickup but also wrote and directed it. He went on to write, direct, produce and star in Thy Neighbor’s Wife (1953), and there’s also a persistent rumor that Cleo Moore was spanked in it.
Another disappointment! It’s a period drama set in 1841, and the truth is that Cleo’s character gets publicly flogged for adultery,
which will be of interest, I expect, only to the hardest of hardcore sadists, and not the usual readership here.
The Richard Greene swashbuckler Captain Scarlett (1953) was originally made as a half-hour television series, but proved insufficiently indestructible to escape cancellation after three episodes, so the material was edited together into a feature film for cinema release. The story anticipates Greene’s most enduring role: the good captain, dispossessed of his lands in post-Napoleonic France, goes around the country fighting injustice and protecting the poor, though for companions he is limited to a single merry man, Pierre, plus a benignly jolly friar and Maid (well, actually Princess) Maria, played by Leonora Amar in riding breeches.
What would have been the second episode, and is now the middle section of the film, begins with Scarlett gallantly saving a lady farmer, Josephine, from some soldiers who want to confiscate her cow (and, therefore, her livelihood). She’s played by Isabel del Puerto:
And she’s not very grateful: the villain bribes her to help him trap Scarlett using her womanly charms.
This intensifies Maria’s antipathy for ‘the cow with the cow’, which is not assuaged when the dastardly plan fails and the main enemies are routed – all except Josephine. She’s not important, says Scarlett as he and his friends ride away victorious. Maria disagrees and immediately rides back for a reckoning. Scarlett and Pierre follow, but at a distance we may have cause to regret; ‘An angry woman is nothing to trifle with,’ says Pierre. So when they arrive, Maria has finished and is emerging from the cowshed, saying ‘I feel better now.’ Out comes Josephine, too, looking somewhat subdued. She gives a sniffle and puts a hand to her bottom:
The implication is discreet, but clear enough: Josephine has just been spanked – alas, offscreen!
Fancy seeing Rhonda Fleming get spanked?
Me too..
Yet more rumor would have us believe that fate is in store for her at the hands of Ronald Reagan in Tropic Zone (1953). She plays Flanders White, owner of a failing banana plantation. He’s Dan McCloud, who gets off on the wrong foot with her when she catches him sleeping in her beach hut, just after she has changed from jodhpurs to swimsuit unaware of his presence, but whom she eventually engages to manage the plantation. The trouble is, their relationship, though it eventually becomes romantic, is essentially an adult, professional one, with no room for a plausible spanking scenario to develop.
It’s not always clear where these rumors come from. Sometimes they may have some scintilla of genuine background information at their root, sometimes mere wishful thinking. In the case of Tropic Zone, it’s a combination of misinformation and overstatement. We should, perhaps reluctantly, stop looking at Rhonda Fleming and pay more attention to the other girl in Dan’s life, Latina nightclub dancer Elena Escobar, played by Estelita Rodriguez (who had already been spanked three times in previous films).
So that’s the misinformation. And the overstatement will be obvious when we see exactly what it is that Dan does to her:
Not unwelcome, but not anything that will increase Estelita’s still impressive tally of screen spanking scenes!
In contrast with all this chaff and uncertainty, the British crime thriller The Good Die Young (1954) certainly featured an honest-to-goodness over-the-knee spanking scene, when GI Eddie Blaine (John Ireland) comes home unexpectedly and catches his wife Denise with her lover. She is played by Gloria Grahame, recently spanked in Prisoners of the Casbah (1953).
As Eddie walks in, Denise and boyfriend are about to take a drink, and he announces his presence with the interjection, ‘Bottoms up.’ It’s only the first straw in the wind. Once he has thrown out the interloper, he says he is going to do ‘something I should have done a long time ago’ – another pretty clear indication of where this is going…
And then, enter another kind of unwelcome interloper, the censor.
Principal photography had already begun at Shepperton Studios when an instruction came from the British Board of Film Censorship: take out the spanking.
It’s not altogether clear why this should have been a problem. There had been no change of personnel at the top of the Board, such as might have resulted in a change of policy: the same President and Secretary, Sir Sidney Harris and Arthur Watkins, had been in charge when the Board had passed, among others, The Girl Who Couldn’t Quite and The Romantic Age (the latter ending with a spectacular hairbrush spanking on a diaphanous negligee and visible panties), though it is true that there was some trouble over the soundtrack of Her Favourite Husband. But now it seems a spanking scene was beyond the pale; there wasn’t another one in a British film until Doctor at Large in 1957.
It’s not known whether the spanking had actually been filmed when the order was issued, but it was evidently so late in the proceedings that a complete rewrite was out of the question, which is why the pre-spanking signals, ‘bottoms up’ and ‘something I should have done a long time ago’, are still there in the final version. Since the preferred option wasn’t permissible, the director, Lewis Gilbert, needed to find something else that would serve the same purpose. He told a visiting journalist what they had come up with:
‘We’re going to have the husband dump the wife fully dressed into a hot bath. This way she suffers indignity as well as discomfort – which is why spanking is so effective!’
But that wasn’t the end of the scene’s censorship troubles. They were also warned that the bathtub scene would itself be unacceptable in America, because it was anticipated that Gloria Grahame would emerge from the water with her dress clinging suggestively to her body. It doesn’t do that in the finished scene (we see very little of her after immersion), but they were concerned enough to shoot an alternative US version where he ducks her under the shower, leaving her merely sprinkled rather than totally sopping.
Ironically, the bathtub scene is now itself considered problematic: it is specifically mentioned as an example of ‘domestic abuse’ in the content warning section of the modern British Board of Film Classification’s page on The Good Die Young, whereas there’s no such warning for any of the spanking scenes in British films of the same era!
The newspaper advertisements told us what to expect from the Western Many Rivers to Cross (1955):
‘The girl needs a spanking – who will do it?’
(It’s tucked away at the bottom right.) An alternative version of the line was:
And another one:
The ‘impatient maiden’ is Mary Stuart Cherne, a frontier gal played by Eleanor Parker,
and the question ‘Who will do it?’ was answered by an anecdote from the set, concerning a scene in which she kicks the trapper and Davy Crockett dressalike Bushrod Gentry (Robert Taylor). She asked Taylor how hard she should do it. ‘Use your own judgment,’ he told her. ‘Just remember, though, that in the final scene I spank you!’
Not in the final release print, he doesn’t! But it’s not for want of trying. In the course of the story, she has an on-off marriage with him, following him out into the Kentucky wild lands but then going off on her own and falling foul of some Injuns. When he rescues her, he remonstrates in promising terms:
BUSHROD: Soon as I get my breath, I’m going to bang you good, causing me all this work.
MARY: You ain’t gonna bang nobody!
BUSHROD: You’re my wife, you’ve got it coming.
So all the evidence points to there having been a spanking scene in the film as planned: an overt spoken threat to set it up, anecdotal evidence that it was on the production schedule and several different versions of a direct statement in the publicity. Sadly, it just didn’t get beyond the cutting room.
Our attention now turns to Julie Adams,
who is best remembered for being in and out of a swimsuit in the vicinity of the Black Lagoon.
She became potentially relevant to us when he played Sheryl Gregory in the plane crash drama The Looters (1955). Press publicity tells us about one of the first scenes she shot with Ray Danton:
‘The first day on the set, the script called for him to smack actress Julie Adams, a girl he had never met before. He smacked her and three months later they were married in real life.’
The story’s headline tells us:
Movie Spanking Leads To Marriage
But watching the film shows us definitively that what he actually does is sock her on the jaw. No spanking was ever intended or done.
Next up for a narrow escape is Marie Windsor.
In The Parson and the Outlaw (1957), she plays the girlfriend of gunman and gambler Ace Jardin (Bob Steele).
At one point he tells her to hand over her money so that he can use it as his stake. When she refuses, he puts her across his knee,
but only to shake the cash out of her. It’s not, as has been reported, a spanking attempt, because not only is there no spanking, there isn’t even any spanking intention – just routine tension that escalates when he loses, and brings them to breaking point when he wagers her on the next hand.
Maybe the arrival of a Western with an OTK scene that isn’t a spanking is a sign that we are starting to pass beyond the great age of cinema spanking scenes. It may be a premature end to the decade; but there are still some more cases to investigate as we travel onwards to the future in the final part of this series.
Vanilla Spanking 