Frontier Gal

Last week I mentioned that I watched two old Westerns on TV that I'd never actually seen before.  The first, as I posted, was Saddle Tramp. which gave us two good publicity stills of Joel McRae spanking Wanda Hendrix but no actual spanking in the movie.  Or, at least, not in the version I saw.  TV has a nasty habit of cutting down the run times of movies by eliminating a few minutes of the movie here and there in order to squeeze in a few more commercials,

The second movie was Frontier Gal.  This one definitely has a spanking scene in it, and while I've seen the spanking many times, I'd never actually seen the movie.  Now I have.  I don't think I was deprived of a whole lot by not seeing it in the past, but it's always nice to see Yvonne DeCarlo getting her bottom whacked.

Hollywood has long known that a spanking in a movie involving the male and female stars usually meant more money at the box office.  This goes back to the silent movie era.  It's why a lot of movies wound up with spanking publicity stills between the two stars even though no such scene appeared in the movie.  They'd give these photos to newspapers and magazines to print, and let the picture generate interest in the film.  They'd even send them along to movie theaters to use next to the movie's poster when they'd put up a "Coming Next Week" display case.

Frontier Gal really did have a spanking scene in it, though, so the Hollywood publicity department was able to go all out.  This is all just speculation on my part, but I imagine this was an early publicity photo, possibly taken during a costume fitting --

They probably hadn't even shot the film at this point, since that is not the costume she's wearing during her spanking in the film.  This is what Yvonne wore when she was on the job as a saloon owner in the film.
It's also the dress she wore while she and the other saloon gals sang the truly horrible song, "Set 'Em Up, Joe (We Gotta Make Dough)".  Yes, nothing says "welcome" to a lonely, hungry and/or thirsty cowboy like a song that tells him flat out that you're only interested in how much money you can get out of him.

The really horrible thing is that we have to hear this song more than once.  Heck, by the second time, I would have been ready to spank her, too!

Later on, after the movie was shot--or, at least, the crucial spanking scene was shot--this photo probably made the publicity and theater rounds, along with the 1-sheet (poster)--

This isn't really the outfit she wore in the movie, either, in that her gloves and skirt are not blue but tan in the film.  Why did someone decide to colorize them blue in the poster?  They probably thought the color "popped", or stood out more and was better for drawing your eye to the picture (as if having the lovely Yvonne DeCarlo being spanked wasn't already enough to draw your attention...)

There would, of course, be other photos of the two stars and alternative posters passed through the publicity mill, but this was enough to get the word out.  Any potential movie-goer who didn't know by this time that Rod Cameron turned Yvonne DeCarlo over his knee for a good bottom-paddling just hadn't been paying attention.

These last pictures are probably screen grabs and not publicity stills, but I'll include them, anyway.  You deserve it for  reading through all this.....