Brenda Joyce plays society girl and spankee Penny Cooper; George Murphy plays waiter/spanker Alan Blake.
"After a waiter gives a society girl a public spanking for attending a Communist rally, her soup tycoon uncle makes the waiter a vice president of his company."
That's IMDB's description of the movie Public Deb #1. What did the newspapers of the time have to say? "Howlingly hilarious...as her penniless boy friend smacks some sense into her! (Print Ad-Times-Record, ((Spencer, W.Va.)) 26 December 1940)"
As we've observed in the past, spanking sells. It's also what everyone in a play or movie audience remembers when the
drama contains a spanking scene, which is why playbills for Kiss Me Kate and movie posters like the one at left often
showcase the spanking. From the clip we're going to see it appears the spanking takes place fairly early in the story:
Soup heiress Penny Cooper (Brenda Joyce) is one of those spoiled rich girls who seek to affirm their sense of virtue
by adopting fashionable left-wing politics ("radical chic" as Tom Wofe called it) and who can afford that luxury - a type
that is unfortunately still with us today - and Alan Blake (George Murphy) is the penurious but hopeful young man
who administers that very well-earned session OTK. The scene is pretty good over all (photographers somehow appear out of
nowhere to record Penny's humiliation for posterity), although having Penny's date
object to the spanking when he should have been cheering Alan on was a mistake, and the staging makes that age-old error
of spanking with the wrong hand. We're not sure how the picture ends, but it was probably a happy ending
because a good spanking generally does the job when adjusting the attitudes of spoiled society girls! 
