https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0022725/
But the director was Ernst Lubitsch (see Bluebeard's Eight Wife) and he was quite fed up with one of his stars, Nancy Carroll (32 at that time - see The Water Hole)
Source: https://mainstreamspanking.wordpress.com
Back in the fall of 1931, he [Lubitsch] was making Broken Lullaby, a sentimental melodrama starring Diana’s uncle, Lionel Barrymore, as a war-bereaved German doctor. Even the most distinguished of actors will from time to time encounter the same difficulty as Eliza Dushku or Ann Sheridan, so it isn’t particularly shameful that he should have forgotten one of his lines at one point. But a younger member of the cast was evidently very irritated by it, to the extent that she rudely called him a ‘tired old man’. Lubitsch found the insult intolerable, and she quickly found herself across his knee getting a good spanking in front of the entire cast and crew.
The journalist who related the story a few years later gallantly affected not to remember the name of the girl Lubitsch spanked, but there’s actually not much room for doubt. Broken Lullaby is a story largely about how the older generation coped with the slaughter of their offspring in the First World War, so there were relatively few younger members of the cast, and only two young women, one of whom (the obscure Joan Standing) didn’t have any scenes with Barrymore.
The rude, spanked actress can only have been Nancy Carroll, who had previously been the naughty, spanked rich girl in The Water Hole (1928).