A cinematic first?

"The film achieved a certain notoriety for the spanking scene, widely regarded as a cinematic first." So says the blurb on the DVD.

I was around back in '63, and do not recall any great notoriety. Cinematic first? The spanking scene presumably being referred to is not even the first spanking in McLintock, let alone the history of cinema! And given we were moving into the hippy 60s I'd say the McLintock spanking(s) were more of a cinematic last than first.

Contributors to flicksgirl's previous thread "The Spanking was for Real" recalls many anterior spankings but few posterior ones. If you see what I mean. In McLintock Stefanie Powers had been sent to finishing school and lined up to marry a young man she did not much care for.

So too was the Cowcatcher's Daughter, in the 1931 Mack Sennett slapstick short of the same name. That could really have been a cinematic first, the earliest example from the talkies (though they were of course many silents before). She ran away from her finishing school to join a circus as a trick rider.

This did not please her father at all when he found out, and he sent his foreman to collect her, and made it quite clear what he intended to do with her when he got hold of her. Her sweet talking and simpering were not going to have any effect on him. So when the foreman brought her back with her tail between her legs he was left sitting on the verandah listening to the proceedings being conducted inside the house.

And then her boyfriend appeared and looked in through the window and watched as she got her bottom spanked over her angry father's knee. A semi-public spanking certainly. And she was seen, and heard, to get a (the first?) SOUND spanking.