Spankings of the Lost Archive

Video killed the radio star, and television killed the movies, or so the conventional wisdom has it. In the 1950s, the Hollywood studios began to put a significant proportion of their production resources into supplying the small screen, which changed the character of the movies they were still making for the big. And the decline in the number of spanking scenes through the 1950s and into the ’60s, although still discernible, is somewhat less pronounced when you factor in the ones that were being made for TV.

And to prove it, here’s a selection of television spanking scenes made in Britain and America after 1963, when cinema spanking went into the twilight, right through into the genre’s darkest decade:

Sergeant Cork (1964)

Rawhide (1964)

The Man from UNCLE (1965)

Gidget (1965)

The Man from UNCLE (1966)

The Tomorrow People (1975)

Father Murphy (1982)

Eye on the Sparrow (1987)

But it’s hard to quantify the material, for several reasons. With a few exceptions, television is less well documented than cinema across the board. Its natural dramatic format is the ongoing, open-ended series, with each episode displaced by a new one every week, meaning that there was less incentive to publicize the particular events of any individual episode than would be the case with even a ‘B’ movie, and critical opinion was more likely to concentrate on the overall series rather than any one installment. Of course there are exceptions, and a number of TV episodes did have spanking publicity stills issued, but with a shelf life of no more than seven days, they were inevitably distributed less widely than those promoting movies.

Moreover, TV was ephemeral, sometimes literally so: the medium’s earliest spanking scenes are irretrievably lost because the programs were performed and broadcast live and never recorded, while other shows have been junked and more still lie inaccessible on archive shelves, too old and unloved to pad out the schedules of even a nostalgia channel and too obscure to be deemed commercially viable to release on home video.

All of that means that our knowledge of television spanking is much more heavily dependent on the recollections of enthusiasts who happened to be watching at the time and shared their memories later on. This brings its own problems: memory can be imprecise, vague and incomplete, and sometimes a reminiscence of what a person did see has become fatally mixed up with what they would like to have seen. So unless we’re going to approach the subject as credulous fantasists, we have to collocate eye-witness testimony with the available contemporary evidence about a show in the hope of coming up with something reasonably solid.

A case where this works quite well is My Friend Irma, about the misadventures of a dumb blonde played by Marie Wilson,

who always said that the secret of her success was, behind the scenes, working three times as hard as any man and, on screen, behaving four times as stupid. The series began life as a film in 1949, followed by a radio show, a comic strip and then, from 1952 to 1954, a TV sitcom. We are told that Irma is spanked by her visiting aunt in one episode, and it turns out that the episode shown on January 16, 1953, does indeed center on a visit from her Aunt Peter (who got her gender-inappropriate name when they immigrated from Sweden and her and her husband’s passports were muddled up). She generously gave Irma a valuable grandfather clock, but fickle, shallow Irma sold it to buy a television set, meaning the aunt’s impending visit causes consternation: she will expect to see her antique gift proudly displayed, not replaced with modern consumer electronics. The outcome, our eye-witness avers, is that Irma eventually admits her misdeed and throws herself across Aunt Peter’s lap asking to be spanked – and, when the spanking is only tentative, tells her to spank harder!

But not every tipoff leads anywhere so solid. Is it helpful to be told that the titular hero of the Western aviation adventure series Sky King (1951-62), played by Kirby Grant, once spanked his tomboy niece Penny (Gloria Winters)?

That may be food for pleasant thought, but the show’s long run, combined with the fact that Penny appeared in every episode, makes it a daunting task to track down the scene – unless of course you really like the series and want to watch the lot for its own sake!

The sitcom Date with the Angels (1957), about the lives of newlyweds Gus and Vickie Angel, starred Bill Williams and the young Betty White (later of The Golden Girls).

Betty White

The second series episode ‘Nobody’s Father’ (November 8, 1957) was publicized in the newspapers like this:

‘When Gus Angel discovers how Vickie has messed up their vacation plans, she’ll be over his knee instead of in his arms!’

Was she? We can but hope!

Don Witty’s one-off Canadian comedy O Pioneers (November 30, 1958) dealt with city girl Polly (Sharon Acker) whose new husband Joe (Lloyd Bochner) takes her for their honeymoon to the country cider mill he has just inherited.

Sharon Acker

She falls in love with the place, but he wants to sell it, and the result of their disagreement is that he spanks her exactly twelve minutes into the play. We owe this uncommonly precise timing to a Toronto Star review by Gordon Sinclair which was headlined:

Man Spanking Woman Revolting Sight

You have been warned! Sinclair wrote:

Let me here and now make a pact with myself that if and when, at any future time, on any program of any kind, a man turns a woman over his knee and spanks her I will at that precise second turn the thing off.

The rest of the play didn’t go down well either…

Onward to 1960, and we take the first of several trips across the Atlantic to watch Inside Story, a semi-anthology series about the various residents of an apartment block. The second episode, ‘Big Bertha’ (March 6, 1960), concerned Bertha Briggs (Joan Young), a battleaxe garage owner who domineers over her adult children until she is hospitalized after a fall. The young people see this as an opportunity to try and get even and become more independent.

Maureen Davis

Her daughter Louie (Maureen Davis) tells her not to worry about the business: she should concentrate on resting and getting her strength back. This provokes Bertha, who sits up in bed and turns Louie over her lap, holding her there for some time with hand upraised before administering what an eye-witness describes as a ‘short, sharp spanking’ – thereby demonstrating that she’s not a total invalid after all and shouldn’t be taken for granted.

Two years later there was a radio adaptation broadcast on Christmas Eve, 1962, with Peggy Mount and Myrtle Reed as the mother and daughter.

Myrtle Reed

Sadly, it’s not known whether the spanking was kept in!

Even sadder is the fact that we are unlikely ever to meet up with the TV incarnation of Bertha Briggs, because the show was made on videotape rather than film. That meant it was both harder to distribute, especially internationally, and easier to destroy by wiping the tape – a fate that did indeed befall a lot of early taped series, including Inside Story.

The same may well be true of an American taped Western, Wrangler, about the adventures of roving cowboy Pitcairn (Jason Evers).

It’s unknown whether the seventh and final show, ‘A Crisis Named Waverlin’ (September 15, 1960), was erased or has survived to this day. It was ‘a rollicking episode’ in which a Turkish rancher’s daughter, Waverlin Ghourbaht, takes a passing fancy to Pitcairn and tries to make her father believe that she has married him. She’s ‘an untamed fireball of a girl’ played by Mary Murphy,

and a contemporary newspaper review tells us the sequence of events:

The ‘bride’ dumps the soup on Pitcairn’s head; he gives her a good spanking; she crowns him with a chair; she slaps him a couple of times…

It is worth noting that this episode does not appear in IMDB, which records a completely different one on this date, ‘Encounter at Elephant Butte’, with none of the cast in common. My information comes from the 1960 TV listings, which show that the ‘Elephant Butte’ episode was actually shown the week before; the only butt involved in the September 15 episode was Waverlin’s, when it was spanked! It turns out that IMDB’s episode guide is one short, six shows rather than seven, with a gap on September 8.

Does Walter Matthau spank Elizabeth Allen in ‘The Man Who Bit a Diamond in Half’, the December 14, 1960, episode of cop show Naked City? ‘No’ is the short answer: reports and listings to that effect are mistaken. They play a quarrelsome couple: self-made Greek millionaire Peter Kanopolis and his wife Emily, a former beauty queen. To spite him, she gets involved in a diamond robbery, and when he realizes something’s amiss he throws her out with only a fur coat to show for the marriage. No spanking, and no real prospect of one because the relationship is over. But never mind, in a few years’ time she’ll be getting one of the last major big-screen spankings,

when she stars with John Wayne in Donovan’s Reef (1963).

We are also told that there was a spanking scene in the Florida detective series Surfside 6 (1960-62), but this time there’s nothing more than that to go on: no episode title, no spanked actress to identify nor any hint of the wider context of the spanking. A look at the brief episode summaries on IMDB doesn’t throw up any front runners, unless it be ‘Local Girl’ (October 31, 1960), featuring the oft-spanked Sue Ane Langdon as a gangster’s girlfriend who steals his cash and goes home to show off her good fortune and show up her unpleasant and possibly abusive father. The episode isn’t available to view, and in fact no episodes at all are easily available, but if you were to pick one at random  to check out, you’d have a 1 in 74 chance of stumbling on the spanking scene – assuming it really existed; otherwise your chance of success would be 0 in 74!

If you think those are poor odds, take a look at Death Valley Days and think again. This Western anthology series ran for 452 episodes from 1952 to 1970, and featured quite a good spanking scene in ‘The Taming of Trudy Bell’ (October 2, 1969), in which the titular Trudy (Valerie De Camp) gets spanked by a tough lumberjack (Buck Taylor) to bring her down a peg or three.

But other spankings may well be lurking somewhere in the remaining 451 episodes, and indeed we have a report of a scene that is clearly not the one in ‘The Taming of Trudy Bell’. I’ll quote it verbatim:

A girl says something to a guy who is driving a buggy of some sort and he drives away. Then he ‘thinks’ about it and returns, gets out of the buggy, puts her over his knee and spanks her rear end. She had on some sort of buckskin skirt, so it was a good spanking with kicking and him laughing, and then I think he dumps her in the buggy and takes her away.

But even with so much specific detail about the spanking itself, there’s little there that would help us tie it down to an individual show.

And another one that seems destined to stay in the shadows is said to have featured in the west coast equivalent of Surfside 6, 77 Sunset Strip, which ran for 206 episodes from 1958 to 1964. We have a fair description of the spanking and its immediate context: a blonde in a light-colored skirt causes an auto accident and at the roadside afterwards gets laid across a man’s knee, ‘flat as a flounder’ for a solid spanking. But alas, none of that gives us anything that might help to identify the episode!

Back to Britain for a slightly puzzling account of an incident in a comedy series starring Bob Monkhouse, which the eye-witness thought dated from around 1959 or 1960. So it was presumably one of the three sketch show specials he made in 1958, 1959 and 1963, all entitled The Bob Monkhouse Hour.  But one of the puzzling things is that the account we have makes the show sound a lot more like a domestic sitcom than a sketch program:

His niece, who is visiting, has committed some offence but tells Bob that he should turn the other cheek. A new scene opens with him on a dining room sofa and her across his knees. I think she is wearing a gymslip and, certainly, sturdy blue knickers. He delivers several loud slaps to her bottom and his wife shouts from the kitchen: ‘Bob, what on earth are you doing?’ He rests his hand on the girl’s bottom and shouts back: ‘I’m turning the other cheek, dear – red.’

But Monkhouse starred in only one sitcom, The Big Noise (1964), which had no domestic dimension. (He played a pop-music-hating disc jockey.) Then there’s the other oddity, the phrase ‘sturdy blue knickers’: not something you would expect to be shown on British television in 1959/60, and not something you would even be able to see, because all the programs were in black-and-white! So at the very least, the eye-witness’ memory has done a bit of creative embroidery or got the date completely wrong – though by the advent of color television Monkhouse’s profile had become much more that of a presenter than a performer.

There’s no actual spanking scene in ‘The Case of the Guilty Clients’, which closed the fourth season of the courtroom drama Perry Mason on June 10, 1961; but an offscreen before-the-action spanking does play a part in the story of Argentinian spitfire Lola Bronson, played by Lisa Gaye.

The episode starts with a hearing in which she is seeking a divorce from her plane-maker husband Jeff Bronson (Charles Bateman), and a key piece of her evidence is that he spanked her in front of their guests at a barbeque after she burned some steaks.

Another one that has gone for good is Bob Phillips’ BBC play The Wrong Way Back (July 13, 1962), in which an older man, Ted (Nigel Davenport), is having an affair with Annie, played by Patricia Haines (who had another spanking coming to her seven years later in the 1969 movie The Last Shot You Hear).

But the good news is that the production script survives, containing not only the dialogue and stage directions, but also all of the camera directions, which means we can reconstruct the visuals in exceptional detail.

The scene in question starts with an establishing shot of the living room. Ted is poking the fire. He stands up as Annie comes in and, taking a tea from her, he warms his backside in front of the fire. The shot changes to a closer shot of Annie. She stands beside him. He gazes ahead thoughtfully. She glances up at him now and then. She looks down between his legs. The shot changes to a two-shot of her and Ted:

ANNIE: That fire is alight, innit?
TED: Hm…?
ANNIE: You’re always warming your backside.
TED: Well… if it gets cold…?
ANNIE: Well, move over.

She edges him sideways with her hip.

TED: Belt up! You’re spilling my tea. Look, I’ll warm yours if you’re not careful.

Annie looks him up and down. She smirks contemptuously.

ANNIE: Phooey. Do you reckon you could? (She slaps his belly.) You’re all fat and flabby.
TED (wagging a warning finger): Now look….

She grabs his finger and makes a soppy face at him.

TED (trying to pull his finger out): Now come out of it…

They put their teas on the mantlepiece and ‘a sort of struggle’ ensues. He chases her around the settee.

TED: You’ll go across my knee. I’m telling you.
ANNIE (laughing): Oh… big man!

They struggle and fall onto the settee. The shot changes to another medium two-shot. Ted turns her a bit.

ANNIE: Okay. Game over.
TED: I’ll give you game over.
ANNIE: I’ve got to do the washing up.
TED: Oh, yes, and that’s another thing. All that washing up you left me last night.
ANNIE: Well, that’s your fault.
TED: Mine! Why?
ANNIE: You should’ve put your foot down, shouldn’t you?
TED: Whaddaya mean? Do you want me to beat you all the time?
ANNIE: Would that be such a bad thing?

She rises. He does too. He gazes at her and almost cocks his head.

ANNIE: Would it…?

She suddenly starts to struggle.

ANNIE (changing her mood): What I object to is you hogging the fire all the time.
TED: Right. You’re asking for it.

They struggle and fight. Ted manages to get her twisted round over his knee. As she goes across his knee, the shot changes to a closeup of her face. Ted slaps her. She howls.

TED (satisfied with himself): There!

The shot changes to a two-shot as, still across his knee, she turns up to look at him. They are both panting a bit. She squirms round and they are both face to face. They kiss suddenly and fiercely. As they separate, Annie buries her face into his chest and Ted looks down at her.

TED (relaxing a bit): I can see I’ll have to take you in hand more often. It’s what you need.
ANNIE: It’s what all women need.

The shot changes to a closeup of Ted.

TED: Yeah. Maybe you’re right.

And the moment is broken with a knock at the door…

Most of the TV programs under discussion are dramas or comedies, simply because that kind of show presents fictional situations that lend themselves to spanking. Game shows usually don’t… but there’s almost always an exception to every rule, and here it’s the celebrity charades quiz show that began life in 1949 under the title Pantomime Quiz, and was then relaunched in 1962 as Stump the Stars. It had a rocky run in this form, networked by CBS in 1962/63 and then in syndicated editions made in 1964 and 1969/70.

In one of those 1960s runs (but we don’t know which), we are told that a female contestant cheated: she interfered with the scoreboard to ensure that her team would win. Justice was done at the end of the show, and took the form of a good spanking!

If you’d like to get a flavor of the show, there’s an incomplete collection of 1962/63 episodes here. I didn’t spot any spanking in the course of a very cursory glance through each one, but should anyone feel inclined to work through them more systematically, please come back and tell us if you find anything I missed!

Route 66 (1960-64) might be described as the TV series equivalent of a beat-generation road movie: the two central characters, Tod Stiles (Martin Milner) and Linc Case (Glen Corbett) drift from state to state across America, seeking nothing and fleeing nothing. They do find things, though – and people. The ‘find’ in ‘Come Out, Come Out, Wherever You Are!’ (October 11, 1963), set in Maine, is the beautiful French-Canadian Marie Duplessis, played by Diane Baker.

Linc falls for her, and she tries unsuccessfully to get Tod to talk him out of his infatuation: she knows she will break his heart. She’s even more anxious when it emerges that Linc, doing temporary work at a sawmill, nearly lost an arm because his mind was on her rather than the job. To stop him getting hurt, she chats up a passing sailor at her birthday party as a one-night stand, which provokes a fight. Misunderstanding her motives, Tod takes her into the kitchen and bends her over the table for a spanking:

She only gets three smacks – but they’re hefty ones!

The sitcom Mona McCluskey , starring red-haired dancer Juliet Prowse in the title role,

was part of the great rollout of color television in the 1965/66 season. The premise, much mocked by critics, was that movie actress Mona Carroll marries air force sergeant Mike McCluskey (Denny Miller), and leads a double life as both star and military wife. She is determined to fulfill the latter role in a conventional way and live within his means, even though her weekly earnings are ten times his monthly pay packet, whilst actually wanting to live in the extravagant manner to which she has been accustomed.

Within a fortnight of its September 16 premiere, the show was tipped for cancellation; orders to halt production were issued just after Christmas, and it came to an inglorious mid-season finish on April 14 after 26 episodes.

We have two independent reports of a scene in which Mona finds herself bottom-up across Mike’s lap. The less circumstantial simply says that she ‘irritates her military husband to the point of turning her over his knee in one of the last episodes’. The other tells a slightly different story: she loses or mislays a valuable household item belonging to Mike’s commanding officer, General Crone (Herbert Rudley), and, though it all turns out for the best, she decides she deserves to be punished and puts herself into spanking position – but he doesn’t actually spank her.

No especially good fit emerges from piecing together the basic plot of each episode from TV listings. One (‘Mona the Soft Air Force Recruit’, January 13, 1966) starts with her trying to retrieve a valuable object, but it’s a coin belonging to Mona herself, and the story then goes off in a different direction. (She disguises herself as a uniformed airman to get into the base and is mistaken for a recruit and put through basic training.) And there’s a promising title in ‘My Husband, the Wife Beater’ (December 2, 1965), except that the point is that he isn’t a wife beater: her eavesdropping aunts think they hear someone being assaulted and assume it’s her, at his hands, and snub him egregiously when they visit. I guess that might fit an episode payoff where she gives him the opportunity to spank her and he doesn’t take it, but it’s a long shot – and, like all flops, the series has gone into near-oblivion and won’t be easy to source and check.

Aimi MacDonald

Want to see the lovely Aimi MacDonald spanked? Well, you could time-travel back to 1977 and buy a ticket to Aladdin. Failing that, there may be another chance, with the honors again falling, we are told, to Bob Monkhouse.

She was in a classroom sketch, wearing a brown gym slip and yellow sash, and was put over his lap, and her slip raised, and her brown school type knickers smacked. One of the Midland companies from Birmingham presented it.

The main sketch series to feature Aimi MacDonald was At Last the 1948 Show, in which one of the running jokes was that she thought the show revolved around her; in fact it was a kind of Monty Python before the fact and wouldn’t have presented this sort of material, with or without Bob Monkhouse. Her other sketch show appearances, as far as I can see, were a single episode with Mike and Bernie Winters in 1968 and five episodes of the Les Dawson vehicle Sez Les (1972) – but none of those listed also featured Monkhouse. In fact, the only TV program I can find which has both Aimi MacDonald and Bob Monkhouse in the credits is the mid- to late ’70s tic-tac-toe game show Celebrity Squares, in which he was the question-master and she was an occasional guest panelist, one of nine enclosed in their own separate boxes; the format didn’t include sketches anyway.

The reference to ‘one of the Midland companies’ suggests this was sometime before 1968, a period when Midlands ITV television was split between two companies, ABC and ATV. (The whole lot was handed to ATV in the 1968 franchise reallocation.) In any event, Sez Les was made by Yorkshire Television and Mike and Bernie’s Show by London-based Thames Television (whose predecessor, Rediffusion, made At Last the 1948 Show). On the other hand, if the report is accurate about a brown gymslip and yellow sash, then this was in the color TV era, which began for Brits in mid-November 1969 and gradually became dominant in the early ’70s.

In short, the witness statement doesn’t stack up. This is not to say that the spanking didn’t happen, just that it probably didn’t happen exactly as described – meaning, sadly, that one person’s happy if slightly distorted memory can’t be converted into something we might all be able to share and enjoy!

Now meet Jo Ann Harris.

Some listings say that she was spanked by Lee Majors in The Men from Shiloh, as The Virginian was retitled for its final season in 1970-71. The episode was ‘Tate: Ramrod’ (February 24, 1971), in which series regular Roy Tate (Majors) is hired to fill in as a foreman (or ramrod) on the Benson ranch while the owner’s son is incapacitated; Jo Ann Harris plays Amanda Benson, the rancher’s teenage daughter who develops a crush on Tate, then becomes unreasonably jealous when she sees him talking to another woman.

She certainly belongs on a list of Western gals who ought to be in a spanking scene,

and early on she does give herself some carefree slaps on the rear after doing some cooking.

But when it comes to the crunch with a nocturnal attempted seduction in a stable, what she gets from Tate is nothing more than this:

‘That’s what your Pa’d do,’ he tells her. ‘Well, you’re not my Pa,’ she retorts, and he comes back with: ‘Let’s pretend I am. Next thing he’d do is turn you over his knee.’ But sadly we don’t get as far as the next thing: the listed ‘spanking’ is just a smacked bottom (and the dialogue’s sense of an escalation between the first thing and the next thing makes it uncommonly clear that there is a meaningful and recognized distinction between the two).

A claim that the actor Leo McKern (best remembered as Rumpole of the Bailey) once spanked a girl in an early ’70s television play led me down a lot of blind alleys until it emerged that it was actually Alec McCowen. He plays the cuckolded husband Percy in David Halliwell’s BBC play Triple Exposure (November 6, 1972), which presents the story three times over from the viewpoints of the three people involved: Percy, his wife Veronica (Sheila Allen) and her lover Len (Tom Chadbon).

Sheila Allen in Triple Exposure

The point is to reveal how subjective ‘truth’ is by showing three different versions of the same events, each of which is ‘true’ for the person concerned. One of the incidents that appears in multiple renditions is Percy spanking Veronica, which is more extreme from her point of view than his… because, as she tells it, she gets it on the seat of her panties! I don’t know what differentiates the non-panties ‘Percy’ and ‘Len’ versions, because, to my regret, I have never seen the play; but there’s a reasonable chance that I and others may, one day, because a copy is held by the British Film Institute.

Another one I haven’t seen is the serial People Like Us (1978), set mainly in a London avenue between the two world wars. It was a dramatization of R.F. Delderfield’s novel The Dreaming Suburb (1958).

Elaine Frith, played by Carol Frazer, is the daughter of a puritanical household whose coming-of-age rebellion entails much promiscuity; she later runs away from home to seek satisfaction as the assistant to a stage conjuror. Her nemesis comes in the form of Audrey Tappertitt, played by Mary Laine, and happens in the June 9 episode, entitled ‘Happy Returns’. Here’s how it plays out in the book:

Audrey the Amazon turned, seized her by the hair, pressed her face into the pillow, jumped on to the disordered bed, and pinned her down with one knee.

Then, releasing Elaine’s hair so that she could turn her head just enough to breathe, she tore down her new pyjama trousers, and commenced to administer a spanking that could be heard very clearly in the lobby downstairs.

Mrs Tappertitt had huge, meaty hands, that were able to cover quite an area, and they were hands that were accustomed daily to tying reef knots in iron bars, and tearing encyclopaedias in two. The wild cries of Elaine squirming on the bed, were soon far louder than those of Tom, folded into the closet, and were certainly penetrating enough to drown the scattered protests of the group standing in the passage, and looking in upon the curious scene.

It was perhaps a full minute before Audrey the Amazon paused and, with a final flip of her wrist, again deposited Elaine on the floor, this time on the side nearest the door.

‘That,’ said Audrey, wheezing a little, ‘is what your mother ought to have done more often! Now get dressed, get your things together, and clear out of here, but don’t take nothing HE gave you, or I’ll start on you again the minute I get me breath back!’

Five pages later, there’s a moment when Elaine is fazed by the memory of ‘the shame and ignominy of her public spanking’.

I understand from contemporary eye-witness testimony that on TV Elaine was still under the bedsheet when she was spanked, and that only one slap was actually seen to land.

It appears that not even one slap lands in an unidentified episode of the 1980s Hawaiian detective series Magnum P.I. (1980-88), starring Tom Selleck in the title role. We are told that the show ends with Magnum putting a young woman in a bikini across his knee and raising his hand, whereupon… Roll End Credits!

We have a different problem with the episode ‘Forbidden Island’, which starts with Magnum on a date with gorgeous Alice Fletcher, only to discover that this is the eve of her wedding. Her socially prominent family gets the idea that he has been trying to seduce her, and her older sister Emily is all for punitive action by the State Department. She agrees to drop charges against him in exchange for his services as a private eye to find a missing family retainer. Unfortunately their first interview does not go well: Magnum ends up calling her ‘a spoiled, self-righteous brat’, and she slaps his face. And then:

MAGNUM: If I don’t leave here right now I’m going to…
EMILY: Going to what?
MAGNUM: Do something somebody should have done a long time ago.
EMILY: Oh, REALLY? What?
MAGNUM: Take you over my knee, and whale the dickens out of you!
EMILY: You wouldn’t dare!
MAGNUM: Oh, I’d dare, all right. But I won’t… I won’t…
(Magnum starts to leave, but just as he hits the doorway, Emily grabs a vase and heaves it after him. It’s a near miss, shattering against the wall. Magnum turns.)
MAGNUM: The HELL I won’t!
(Magnum moves towards her, and Emily starts to back away, scared.)
EMILY: You stay away from meeeee!
(Magnum’s got her, and over his knee in a second. His open hand is upraised, when the absurdity of the situation hits him. He starts to crack up, laughing. Emily meanwhile is kicking and screaming. Magnum stands up, dumping Emily unceremoniously to the ground. Emily jumps up quickly, brushing herself off, and reassembling her disheveled dignity.)
EMILY: Well! I certainly never in my life!

That’s an extract from the script, dated November 29, 1982, and written by former actress Karen Klein, whose credits include episodes of T.J. Hooker and Star Trek: Voyager. But her credits do not include any episodes of Magnum P.I., nor does ‘Forbidden Island’ appear in any episode listing for the series. In other words, it’s an episode that never actually got made!

And with that, the twilight sets in for television as it did for cinema two decades earlier…

Hrabal at Nymburk

Nymburk is not like Dalesice. Both are tourist hotspots for Postriziny enthusiasts, their respective breweries the locations for the 1976 novel and the 1980 film. Perhaps there’s even just a scintilla of rivalry between the two. Here’s a calendar the Nymburk brewery marketed in 2014 (and for 2015),

where the film scene is lifted out of its Dalesice setting and relocated to the distinctive yellow walls of Nymburk!

But Nymburk’s connections are with the author Bohumil Hrabal more broadly, rather than with Postriziny in particular: the town was his childhood home. That makes it a somewhat different tourist environment from Dalesice: it’s a bit like comparing Stratford-on-Avon with the Globe Theatre in London. So in Nymburk there are many different local institutions promoting and celebrating Hrabal, not just the brewery; and since 1999, two years after Hrabal’s  death, they have collaborated in running, on the penultimate Saturday in May, an annual convention in his honor at nearby Kersko. This features, in a pleasant woodland setting, a full-day program of talks, readings, live music and sometimes a half-hour performance by the local amdram troupe of highlights from one of Hrabal’s works, which is what we’re here for.

The earliest peformance we know about was in 2008, when they did the stamp-spanking scene from Closely Watched Trains, with Amalie Votrubova as Zdenicka:

The actors seem to have been so keen on it that they did a full production later the same year, which may be seen on video and in pictures:

Amalie clearly has a number of specialties in her acting life, and one of them is playing attractive young Hrabal heroines – a consequence of which is that she is destined to get spanked a lot as our history continues!

In 2014, the Nymburk local library ran a Hrabal memorial afternoon, with performances of some of highlights from his work, including Amalie as Maryska in Postriziny:

The video is here.

It was Trains again for the event in May 2017, and another airing for Amalie, though you might not guess that to see her rehearsing al fresco with Lukas Fiala as Hubicka:

Don’t worry: she had a skirt in the performance, some of the time…

Stamp at the ready!

And, as we know, Zdenicka’s mother doesn’t think much of that, or indeed of her naughty daughter:

The video is here and here.

In 2022, the chosen show was Postriziny, giving us another chance to see Amalie as Maryska, once again paired with Lukas Fiala as Francin:

There are videos (from different angles) here and here.

And that may have been Amalie’s last spanking after nearly a decade and a half as the company’s young female lead. It was back to Trains in 2023, but now with a different Zdenicka, the almost aptly-surnamed Iva Spinkova. Here she is in a street-clothes rehearsal,

and in performance, wearing the same dress as adorned Amalie in 2017:

As usual, Mom is not amused, though this time she doesn’t reinforce her displeasure with the palm of her hand, just points a finger or two:

The video is here.

So now we’ve seen Spinkova stamped. And that begs the question: when they next do Postriziny, will we also see Spinkova… spanked?

But in the meantime, applause for all the wonderful Nymburk performers!

Postscript: And the answer to the question appears to be… perhaps we shall! Because if you happen to be in the Czech Republic next weekend (May 18-19), the festival is on again in Kersko… and this year they’re doing Postriziny!

In and Out of the Frame

Last time, I proposed the theory that the physical setup of some spanking imagery is designed to facilitate spectators imagining themselves into the position of the spanker, not by empathy but simple substitution, and that this might account for the frequency of left-handed spanking poses. The same rationale might also explain another viewing angle you don’t see nearly so often, though it has had a venerably long history:

It is also found in at least one instance where the spanking isn’t OTK, in an illustration by Dick Francis for Robert Richard’s 1954 fantasy short story ‘Reluctant Adam’, in which an unexpected elf supplies USAF officer Rudolph Collins with the girl of his dreams. Eve turns out to be his equal in physical size and proves stubbornly reluctant to vary domestic routine when required, which explains both why he spanks her and how he does it:

He was not too angry to realize that she was far too big to take over his knee, so he simply threw her on the bed, face down, and began to whale away.

One reason why this is a less common type of composition is that it risks making the scenario completely one-sided.

That may be fine when the image is addressed primarily to one gender, and operates by encouraging empathy rather than inviting self-insertion.

But otherwise it arguably sells short a scene that necessarily, as I said last time, involves two participants.

Now let’s put the point about spectator substitution together with the broader question of the variety of available angles, and introduce another viewpoint:

It illustrates a factor we haven’t yet considered: that the ‘spanker’s eye view’ will always be elevated. But it’s an even rarer angle, perhaps because of the extra trouble required to get the camera up high, perhaps because it’s one that makes both participants effectively anonymous. That needn’t matter so much in cinematography, such as the scene in the sub-Bond Spanish-Italian spy thriller Agente 3S3, Massacro al Sole (1966), when the sub-Bond himself (George Ardisson) spanks the villainess, Signora Barrientos (Luz Marquez),

because there’s not only the spanking itself but scenes before and after making these characters more than just a spanking hand and a bathrobed bottom.

In stills photography, however, maybe an over-the-shoulder view isn’t always the best use of a high angle.

If we turn back to the empathic dimension of how an image strikes its viewer, the high angle will convey a sense of the spanker’s dominance, whereas a low angle will correspondingly suggest the girl’s powerless abjection:

Both those examples, high and low, also illustrate another phenomenon. In the first part of the series, I mentioned how certain angles force the girl to contort herself to let the camera see her face. The same limitation applies, only to an even greater extent, if the photographer wants her to look at the spanker, whether one way…

or the other:

The meaningful interaction between the two participants is necessarily more hand-to-bottom than face-to-face. So where can a naughty girl look?

In this position it’s physically easier to look out of the frame, beyond the scenario and directly at the camera – which also means directly at the detached spectator, breaking the fourth wall.

It’s another photographic convention with a long pedigree:

Some couples appear to have broken off proceedings so that they can both acknowledge the camera:

And there are many interesting variants of facial expression. We’ve already seen girls looking bored and girls looking happy. They can also look wryly content with the situation,

or feign an attitude of cheekily complicit dismay.

Best of all is the dismay that’s less knowing, less collusive, the face that says, ‘Oh no, I’m being spanked – and there’s somebody watching!’

But it does help if she really is being spanked, properly, across the knee:

Oh yes, she’s being spanked – and we’re watching!

The Spankings That Cinema Forgot: The 1960s and Beyond

We start with a tidbit that was circulating in the North American press in the late summer of 1963:

‘Female stars are taking a beating in Hollywood. Elizabeth Allen is spanked by John Wayne in Donovan’s Reef, and Joanne Woodward receives the same treatment from Paul Newman in A New Kind of Love.’

It’s hard to say too definitive a ‘Phooey!’ to that when I haven’t seen the whole of A New Kind of Love, in which Newman’s character, Steve Sherman, mistakes Woodward’s, Samantha Blake, for a high-class prostitute. (This was, incidentally, eight years after Joanne Woodward had been spanked in a publicity still for Count Three and Pray, and five years since she won her Oscar, and she and Paul Newman became husband and wife.)

But as we go forward into the new decade, we have to remember two facts: the major Hollywood films tended increasingly to have the kind of wide dissemination, on television, that would get them noticed and noted down by people interested in our subject (or indeed whatever else they might feature); but in any event the great age of Hollywood spanking was drawing to a close. So from here on, American films were less likely to have spanking scenes in the first place, and those that did are more likely to be known to us already. The same logic discourages credulity about claims that, in Walk on the Wild Side (1962), the 1930s lesbian brothel madam Jo Courtney spanks her star attraction Hallie ‘on the seat of her silky gown with a large hairbrush as she lay face down across a bed’. The parts are played by Barbara Stanwyck (spanked offscreen in The Great Man’s Lady twenty years earlier) and the French actress Capucine,

but there’s no such scene in the release print of the film, and it all sounds just a little too much like wishful thinking or, at best, muddled memory.

In a nutshell, the Hollywood well has more or less dried up, and most of our cases in this final phase of the investigation are going to come from the film industries of other countries.

The cases aren’t always any more straightforward. Take the way the 1960 French comedy Les Tortillards (Slow Trains), about a touring theater company, was misleadingly publicized for the German and Italian markets:

Variations in panty color are arguably not much of a deception, in view of the fact that it’s a black-and-white film.

But now look at the original photograph from which those poster images were composited:

The star, Louis de Funès, is actually trying to swat a fly (his character’s an insecticide manufacturer), and nobody at all gets spanked in the film, on her panties or otherwise!

Does Fernandel, as has been claimed, spank or even smack anyone in the French crime caper Le Caïd (The Boss; 1960)? He plays an unassuming university professor on a trip to Paris, who inadvertently gets caught up in the aftermath of a heist. The proceeds of the robbery may be less of a temptation than that offered by Cécile the chambermaid (Monique Vita),

and by crookess Rita (Barbara Laage) in her undies:

Sadly, he really is unassuming: no smack, and definitely no spanking, though he does get a kiss from Rita right at the end. So where did the report of a spanking come from? Maybe someone over-optimistically misinterpreted this photograph,

in which, as is obvious already and even more so if you watch the film, she is merely helping him off with his shoes.

We turn next to the Swedish low comedy film series about an idler named Åsa-Nisse, which ran more or less annually from 1949 to 1969.

It is credibly reported that in the 1962 entry, Åsa-Nisse på Mallorca (… in Majorca; 1962), a deceived husband spanks his wife with a hairbrush, which proves to her that he is a real man. A glance at the cast list results in the educated guess that the couple in question are Fredrik and Ulla Vaktell, played by Georg Funkquist and Lissi Alandh.

(The only other young woman is Monica Andersson, played by Anne Nord, who is the bikini blonde at the foot of the film poster; but she doesn’t appear to have anyone who could be her husband.) It may yet be possible to source the film on DVD, but as it stands this is simply one for the watch list.

Next up is Phaedra (1962), a Greek-French-US co-production starring Melina Mercouri in the title role,

and directed by her future husband Jules Dassin, who during his pre-blacklist time in Hollywood was also responsible for Young Ideas (1943). It’s a modern version of the ancient Greek tragedy by Euripides, with Theseus turned into the Greek shipping magnate Thanos, and his son Hippolytus renamed Alexis. He’s not the first role played by Anthony Perkins to have a complicated relationship with his mother (or, this time around, stepmother), who is sent to fetch Alexis from London to spend some time with his father and ends up having an affair with him.

The following picture was captioned: ‘Melina Mercouri receives a spanking from Tony Perkins with a squeal of delight as they rehearse a scene.’

Well, obviously she’s not receiving a spanking in the strictest sense of the word, but if he even so much as smacks her bottom in the film itself, I fear I missed it…

And missing it is easily done when the spanking is as incidental as it is in Italy’s Carmen di Trastavere (1962), another version of the Bizet story starring Giovanna Ralli in the title role:

She gets into a catfight with a sadly uncredited blonde (the only other woman named in the cast list was born in 1897!), which includes a rather sloppy spanking:

It’s most welcome, but not something that’s ever going to be noticed or remarked upon by anyone who isn’t primarily interested in spanking!

Next to nothing is known of the 1963 Turkish comedy Şoförün Kismeti (Driver’s Destiny), except for four things: it was a sequel to the previous year’s Şoförün Aksi; something interesting happens, in triplicate;

the girls it happens to seem to be Benan Öz, Birsen Menekşeli and Serpil Gül; and the scene was apparently important enough for it to feature on the film poster.

In contrast, we know a huge amount about Goldfinger (1964), with Honor Blackman as Pussy Galore.

The Bond films are exceptionally well documented and easily available, which means we also know what doesn’t happen in them. For example, Bond (Sean Connery) doesn’t spank Tilly Masterson, played by Tania Mallet,

something he at least considers doing in the original 1959 novel, but decides against because ‘it would be ungallant to spank her, so to speak, on an empty stomach’ (meaning with her lying on her stomach over his knee). The book was adapted for the screen by Richard Maibaum, whose very first screenplay was We Went to College (1936), with a spanking scene, but the most we get in Goldfinger is this for Bond’s masseuse, Dink, played by Margaret Nolan:

What I’m driving at is that, disappointingly, Bond doesn’t do what contemporary press reports from the set claimed: he doesn’t put Pussy Galore across his knee and spank her after their fight in the barn. He doesn’t even smack her bottom, despite the following easily misinterpreted photographic evidence:

For that reason, we should be cautious in our conclusions about the German comedy Ein Ferienbett mit 100 PS (A 100-Horsepower Holiday Bed; 1965), when the film itself isn’t available and all we have to go on is this picture:

OTK or Faux-TK? Maybe a few Germans know the answer, but I don’t!

Back to Britain next for The Last Shot You Hear (1969), a murder thriller starring William Dysart and Michael Caine’s ex-wife Patricia Haines (previously spanked on television in 1962’s The Wrong Way Back).

They play a writer’s wife, Anne Nordeck, and her lover, Peter Marriott, but we don’t need to go very far into the movie or its story, because we’re primarily concerned with a title-sequence montage of them cavorting around the countryside doing things that lovers typically do, including:

Back in the US of A, though only on the fringes of the legitimate movie industry, The Cult (1971) purports to show how Charles Manson and his ‘family’ of killers came to be depraved, with the present in color and the explanatory flashbacks in monochrome. In reality, it’s an exploitation film with a lot more sex than plot, and a ‘past-tense’ spanking that’s regrettably intercut with a ‘present-tense’ brutal beating, and even more regrettably plays into the movie’s fixation on incest.

It was released in Germany with a different title intended to uncouple it from the Manson horrors, and which misrepresented it as another kind of horror altogether: Die Töchter des Satans (Satan’s Daughter).

We now take a break from cinema’s ’70s slide into skinflicks, as Britain serves up wholesome Hayley Mills for a spanking.

She gets it in What Changed Charley Farthing? (1975), administered by that regular mid-’70s US import, Doug McClure. He plays the title role, a seaman of doubtful morals; she plays Jenny, an expatriate Irish lass who teases him and pays the price:

And after three genuine, if obscure, spanking scenes, we must now return to the world of myths and legends and outright falsehoods.

When Rooster Cogburn (1975) came up for a television screening in 1977, the Vancouver Sun previewed it in these terms:

Oh, good grief! Do I really need to comment on this specious nonsense? Other than to say, of course, that Wayne did two spanking scenes in 1963, Hepburn was spanked onstage in The Taming of the Shrew in 1955, and the Rooster Cogburn screenplay was written (under a pseudonym) by retired actress Martha Hyer, who was herself spanked in both Thunder Mountain (1947) and Rustlers (1949), but didn’t visit the same experience on Hepburn a quarter of a century later.

If anything more needs to be said, then it is simply that the Wayne Myth seems to be always with us… as witness the Manchester Evening News getting all unnecessarily umbrageous about The Quiet Man in 1990:

But I digress. Let’s head for Italy and two more actual movie spankings. The first is Assassinio sul Tevere (Murder on the Tiber; 1979), part of a series of crime comedies starring Tomas Milian as hairy undercover cop Nico Giraldi. Also of interest in this entry is Angela Santi, played by Roberta Manfredi.

She claims to have admired him since she was a young girl, and when she puts her oar into his business, he proceeds to treat her like the young girl she no longer is:

Made towards the end of the heyday of the Italian ‘commedia sexy‘ genre, Una Vacanza del Cactus (Cactus Vacation; 1981) deals with the comical adventures of a group of Italians on a company vacation in Rhodes. Of the two women in the party, the secretary Angela (Annamaria Rizzoli) supplies the conventional eye candy,

and the boss’s wife, the slightly older Fedora (Graziella Polesinanti), provides a lot of funny moments as her short-sightedness gets her into embarrassing difficulties, like going into the men’s room to adjust her clothes,

or tripping over in the bedroom, with no idea that the man in bed whose knees she falls across is not her husband.

Also along for the ride is a cactus which the broad-comedy character Augusto (Bombolo) is taking to lay on his uncle’s grave; its deadly spines prove hazardous to all human life in the vicinity.

In the relevant sequence, Augusto is driving to the cemetery with the girls when a sudden stop brings one half of Fedora’s rear end into sudden contact with the prickly menace. Augusto bends her over the hood to pull out the thorns – but before each one, he gives her a smack on the opposite, unpunctured cheek to distract from the extraction.

 

And of course she has difficulty sitting down later in the sequence!

Notwithstanding Die Töchter des Satans, horror films are not a genre where you usually expect to find a spanking scene, and there isn’t one in Clive Barker’s Hellraiser (1987), but that wasn’t for want of trying. The story concerns Julia Cotton (Clare Higgins) and her efforts to raise from the dead her brother-in-law and former lover Frank (Sean Chapman).

They were already shooting the film when they realized that there was no obvious reason why Julia should want to do such a thing. After a bit of head-scratching, Clare Higgins came up with a bright idea:

‘I think she’s into spanking.’

In other words, she has niche sexual tastes and wants Frank back to service them, because she’s not getting any of that from her husband, Frank’s brother. Clive Barker liked the idea and they shot a flashback scene in which Julia gets a good spanking. But then the rushes were shown to the American executive producers at New World Entertainment, who responded:

‘We’ve just seen yesterday’s footage. Sensational. We can’t use any of it.’

The problem was the Motion Picture Association of America, which, though not admitting the fact, operated an absolute ban on spanking scenes: they claimed that every case would be judged on its merits, but the truth was that spanking would always be censored in any event. So the footage was junked and a flashback with conventional sex was substituted.

It’s not certain that the ban was quite as absolute as the producers understood, given that there is a brief (and mean-spirited) spanking scene in Where Are the Children?, released in September 1986 shortly before the production of Hellraiser. But the understanding that this was generally a no-go area explains why the 1980s was such a barren decade for spanking in American cinema.

It also means it’s not very surprising that our final case is a film that was scripted but never went into production: 666: The Life of Aleister Crowley, written in 1996 by Gerard Suster.

Crowley (1875-1947) was an occultist with a disturbingly penetrating stare, who was once called ‘the world’s wickedest man’, though not because of an incident in the film script when his new wife Rose disturbs him as he is trying to read. This leads to the following:

‘Crowley grabs Rose, pulls her over his knee, ignores her struggles, whips up her skirt and petticoats and spanks her.’

This was based directly on an incident that took place in 1903, early in the marriage, and which Crowley wrote about in his Confessions (1929), in terms which, needless to say, I don’t endorse:

‘The honeymoon was uninterrupted beatitude. Once, in the first three weeks or so, Rose took some trifling liberty; I recognized the symptoms, and turned her up and spanked her. She henceforth added the qualities of perfect wife to those of perfect mistress. Women, like all moral inferiors, behave well only when treated with firmness, kindness and justice.’

Mrs Rose Crowley

The film may have foundered because of competition rather than censorship: another Crowley film, with a screenplay by Snoo Wilson and with Simon Callow as its prospective director, was being touted around at the same time, though in the event it too didn’t make it to the screen.

And that takes us right to the verge of the 21st century, where films are, for the time being, too recent to be forgotten, even if sometimes they are obscure enough to be overlooked. So that’s where this investigation comes to its natural end.

But like a good postmodern narrative, there’s also an alternative ending… which we’ll come to next time.

Videos: A couple of the spanking scenes discussed here can be found online: Assassinio sul Tevere and Una Vacanza del Cactus.

Acknowledgement: Thanks to Dean for finding one of those video links!

Night at the Brewery

Postriziny, Jiri Menzel’s much-loved nostalgic Czech film of 1980, based on Bohumil Hrabal’s much-loved comic novel of 1976, was shot in a disused brewery in Dalesice, a better practical option than the operational brewery at Nymburk that was the real-life original setting for Hrabal’s story. So it was there that Maryska (Magda Vasaryova) was spanked by her husband Francin (Jiri Schmitzer) for getting her hair cut short, one of several scenes in the film that later became iconic.

The premises passed into new ownership in 2002, and brewing started up again. But the esteem in which the film is held makes it more than just a working brewery. Tourists come to visit the place, not just to see how beer comes into existence, but also where the film was made. Some try to match up scenes with their real-life locations.

Others come to get married, and, if they have a head for heights, daring brides and grooms and guests are allowed to reenact another of the film’s famous moments:

Visitors can also enjoy a display of props and costumes from the film, and the scale of enthusiasm for the spanking scene in particular is apparent from the fact that one of the exhibits is:

A close look at the lace trim will reveal something unexpected – that these are not in fact the original panties that graced the bottom of Magda Vasaryova in the movie:

Though you will be seeing the exhibited pair again, being put to their proper use, if you pay close attention to what follows.

The panties are, in fact, such a popular feature of the spanking scene that another of the brewery’s sidelines is selling souvenir reproductions, which romantic young men buy for their best beloved! (If you want a pair for yours, go here.) It’s reasonable to suppose that the gift may sometimes have led to a private reenactment of the original scene, but it’s also reasonable to observe that lovers can do that no matter what undies she happens to be wearing:

And that’s fortunate, because the firm that makes the reproduction panties often can’t supply enough to meet demand at the brewery!

But for renactments on site at Dalesice, maybe a degree of respectful authenticity is called for…

And the spanking is indeed reenacted there quite often. It so happened that in 2007, the tenth anniversary of Hrabal’s death coincided with the formal launch of the reproduction panties. So on March 9, to mark both events, the brewery hosted an open-air performance of the spanking scene on the very spot where it was filmed 27 years before. Maryska was played by local waitress Jana Pasekova, who seems not to have actually committed the hair-cutting misdeed for which she was spanked!

Of course she’s wearing the panties that are being ‘christened’ (in the smallest of the five available sizes), and we are told that she thoroughly enjoyed playing the part!

Now we slip forward in time seven years to another Hrabal anniversary: the 2014 centenary of his birth. Someone had a bright idea: a special nocturnal tour of the brewery, showing visitors the parts that other tourists cannot reach, with actors from the local amdram company performing key scenes from the film as visitors passed through each location. The event, called Hrabalovska Noc (Hrabal Night), took place in September and concluded with the spanking of Maryska, played on this occasion by Magdalena Potuckova:

Was that good or bad news for her? Who knows… but it was good for the newspapers:

The event was such a hit that the brewery decided to do it again the following year. Here’s the troupe that took part at the end of August 2015:

The one who most interests us is the one who’s most interestingly dressed there. Her name’s Kristyna Bazalova, and here she is, wearing a little more and gearing up for her big scene.

The actors rehearsed in the daytime, before the visitors arrived.

But as before, the actual performance was at night.

And so the Hrabalovska Noc began to turn into an annual tradition. It ran again in September 2016, with another different cast, including the lovely Libuse Jonasova.

Here she is arriving with that fatal haircut:

And this is what it earned her:

For a better look, here’s the daytime rehearsal:

And since you can take a better look, pay close attention to those panties – again, they’re a pair from the brewery’s range of reproductions!

And just to prove that she enjoyed it, really, here’s the reverse angle:

Does that mean there were so many amateur lady actors, all eager to be spanked, that they had to take it in turns? Maybe, but we now come to one who played the part two years running. Here she is in 2017:

And now in 2018, she’s back:

And so is her hat, which saved her from having to cut her long hair short.

The event happened again in 2019 on the last day of August, and this time Barbora Potuckova played Maryska, but sadly there aren’t any pictures relevant to our theme; and then 2020 saw an enforced Hrabalovska hiatus…

The world got back on track in time for the summer of 2022. And as usual, the highlight of the event is Maryska, this time played by Simona Pechova…

Also as usual, there’s a prominent emphasis on Maryska’s panties. Of course, there has to be: quite apart from the authenticity, there’s the marketing to consider!

And now for Maryska’s reaction:

She’s enjoying it… a lot. Enjoying it so much that…

Surely she isn’t reaching back to… But take another look over on the other side: she is!

And that’s really quite, quite remarkable. In recent years you often find professional productions erring on the side of modesty in this scene, with oversized, full-cover bloomers or a staging choice that ensures the audience sees relatively little, as in Olomouc’s operatic version of 2021, or even, as at Pilsen in 2019, a skirt that simply stays down. You don’t often see a pro attempt the original movie Maryska’s invitation to take things further:

But here’s an amateur Maryska going several inches beyond even what Magda Vasaryova did, all the while knowing that there’s a working video camera behind her looking straight at the bottom she’s starting to bare! (The video is here.)

There was an extra event in 2023. In the spring, the brewery enhanced its tour with a new multimedia element, and the local amateurs were invited back to celebrate its launch…

in the traditional Dalesice way!

And for those who are interested in such matters, a closer look will reveal two things to the discerning eye:

that the panties were fresh out of the packet just before she started the scene and (the logical corollary) she has her own modern bikini panties on underneath.

The main 2023 event featured the same performers in mostly the same costumes, the main differences not being visible here:

She’s wearing a different pair of panties, apparently a size smaller,

and you still can’t see the other difference, the absence of the second, personal pair underneath.

This time round, Maryska’s desire to be spanked on her bare bottom is repesented differently: her panties don’t go down but up, as she wedgies herself to expose some skin.

Dalesice hasn’t entirely cornered the market in Postriziny tourism. The brewery at Nymburk, Hrabal’s childhood home where the original novel was set, also celebrates its connections with the story and its author. Come back next week to see how they do it!

Southpaw Spankers

The next dimension of our current topic has already featured in a number of the pictures shown in the first part of the series, but let’s have a few dedicated examples to pin it down, from a 1960s historical pageant to a 1980s grunge mag to modern (and ‘modern retro’) photography.

In real life, about one in ten people are left-handed.

But those proportions do not seem to be reflected across the corpus of spanking imagery: right-handers are generally in the majority, as expected, but left-handers are a much more substantial minority than 10% — and in the case of documentable scenes in high school productions of Men are Like Streetcars, remarkably, the southpaw spankings outnumber the right-handers by two to one!

(To see the full survey, start here.)

I can think of two or maybe three possible explanations for the statistically anomalous proportion of left-handed scenes: they aren’t mutually exclusive and they might each be true in different cases. Maybe other people will have other, perhaps better ideas.

One turns on the question of what is the most strenuous part of a spanking, and therefore the task for which the spanker will use his dominant hand. You might suppose that the core element is smacking the girl’s bottom, repeatedly and hard, requiring the full force of the stronger arm. But the other hand has its allotted function too:

Don’t underestimate the importance of the hand pressing down on the small of her back to keep her in position while the spanking is in progress! That’s one big girl to control and just one arm to do it with… so there’s at least as good an argument for using the right hand there and leaving the ‘PLAPS‘ to the left.

And the other half of that rationale might also apply, especially in examples where the spanking is performative rather than primarily punitive, and even more so when the performer concerned is an inexperienced amateur. If you don’t actually want to hurt the girl, then it’s safer for a right-handed spanker to use his left hand, because it will still (hopefully) be a spectacular display but with less force deployed. That might apply especially to high school spanking scenes, and so help to explain the Streetcars anomaly.

The third possible explanation introduces an aspect we have not yet considered. We are accustomed to think of a spanking as a transaction between two participants: giver and recipient, upright and horizontal, spanker and spanked.

But in any spanking scene, whatever the medium, there is always a third party. In real life, many spankings take place in private and are genuinely a matter between two individuals; but spanking scenes are always made to be observed by someone, whether it’s a single person looking at a photograph or an assembled audience of hundreds in a playhouse or movie theater. And there is a 9-1 chance that any given individual among those third parties will be right-handed.

With that in mind, take a look at some more examples.

The last one helps to underline that, for the idea I’m pursuing, gender is immaterial. In fact, even left-handedness, in literal terms, is beside the point.

In those two examples, the lady’s spanking hand is her right, even though the naughty girl is across her knee with her head towards the left of the frame, putting her bottom closest to the spanker’s left hand. But the slight awkwardness of the pose doesn’t matter either…

Some spanking photography, especially but not exclusively porn, deliberately composes the shot so that the spanker’s head is out of frame. These two examples, needless to say, are not porn:

The spanker becomes effectively anonymous, a lay figure important only in establishing that this is actually a spanking photo and not just a shot of a generic prone girl. But it is the girl who counts. Strip it down to its most essential element and what you are left with is this:

If a spanking photograph works rhetorically by making spectators imagine themselves in the position of the spanker, with the girl across their knee, then her orientation, right to left or left to right, will make a big difference. There are 180 degrees of difference between the spanker in the picture and the fantasizing person looking at it, so it’s the left-handed position that translates into the ‘natural’ one for the right-handed 90% of observers. And that’s my third possible explanation for the curious preponderance of southpaws in spanking imagery.

It has to be said that this kind of visual substitution only works within quite a narrow range of viewing angles, close to four-square with the spanker and the observer, so to speak, sitting directly opposite one another. Once a front- or rear-favoring angle puts the spanking onto the diagonal,

it’s very difficult for the observer to get in.

But there are other ways to engage and involve the audience – which will be our theme in the third and final part of this series.

The Spankings That Cinema Forgot: The 1950s

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.