There is no spanking in this movie from 1942, IMDB entry: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0034509/
But there was a public spanking on set for Diana Barrymore (21) if the sources are correct.
[...]about Diana Barrymore, daughter of John and part of the closest thing America had to theatrical ‘royalty’.
In 1942, she was making her second film with star billing, Between Us Girls, alongside Robert Cummings, and the story goes that she was given to such hilarious pranks as hitting Cummings across the shins with a length of metal pipe. Cummings responded, we are told, in a way that was demonstrative but perhaps not unreasonable within the norms of the time: he ‘taught her decorum by turning her over his knee and giving her a business-like spanking before the assembled company’.
That was how the story went years later in 1947. And it was brought out again in 1952 as part of a retrospective of her chequered career: ‘he lost his temper, turned her across his knee and gave her one of the soundest paddlings a young woman ever received’ – though not one which could be said to have had any lasting salutary effect, given that the occasion of the article was her being fired from three stage plays in rapid succession for offensive ad-libbing!
Allegedly there was a spanking scene filmed for the movie - but it didn't make the cut.
The spanking was re-created later on though - for a publicity picture:
This is an entry for a so-called publicity still. It's (very likely or proven) just a picture form promotion reasons since there is no spanking scene in the movie itself (or it has been cut).
This is a fascinating example, because there are essentially two separate stories of Robert Cummings spanking Diana Barrymore - once for the film and once in real life - but they seem like they could be intertwined.
The existence of the promo shot means there is at least a partial truth here. And it's a great promo shot, with the blurred hand implying that the promo itself wasn't entirely fake.
Was it the case that there was a spanking originally shot for the film, which triggered the promo picture and in turn some made-up (or heavily exaggerated) press-release stories about a real on-set spanking? We do have to take with pinch of salt anything published in Hollywood gossip columns of the era.
But that being said, the Hedda Hopper story was quite specific in its details about the context. Interestingly Harry in his piece on it quotes another gossip columnist "‘Perhaps Cummings has super-sensitive shins or perhaps he lacks a proper sense of humor. At any rate he lost his temper. Then and there, before the assembled company, he told Miss Barrymore the facts of life. Loudly and eloquently!’" and reads that as being evidence against the spanking having occurred. To me, that 'loudly and eloquently told her the facts of life' could, without too much squinting, be read as a coy allusion to a spanking..
So was there a real spanking incident which itself inspired the promo picture and this got twisted later into a story about there originally being a spanking shot for the film?
Or was there both a cut film scene and a real spanking? And if so, was it pure coincidence or perhaps one inspired the other (in either direction!). Or were they even one and the same - a scripted film spanking where Ms Barrymore's behaviour led to it being enacted as a real one?!
