The Sweat Shop

 

“The Sweat Shop” is an 18-minute movie released by Phoenix late in 1983.  The release was announced in Phoenix 19 which also included 9 pages of photographs from the movie.  I can’t find any evidence that this movie was released in the US and it is not available on any of the CalStar Direct sites.

I had no idea who produced “The Sweat Shop” when I first discovered a copy in November 2018.  I had seen several movies from that era with simple white on black title cards but the only mention of this movie I could find described it as a “An early British film, in the manner of Blushes or Roue”.  Later I found a post on a spanking-board.com page that suggested it might be a Kane movie but I was eventually able to prove that it wasn’t.  I still don’t know who made it but I do know that Phoenix distributed it.  Phoenix obviously dealt with several producers; the difference between the simple title card for this movie and the more sophisticated title card for “St. Rules School for Young Ladies – Make Believe” that was made about the same time is striking.

This movie has a cast of four, one man and three women.  Two brunettes play sewing machine operators Louise and Jane (they look like blondes in some scenes because the color has faded) who work under the supervision of a blonde.  A man appears toward the end of the movie as the factory owner.  I haven’t been able to identify any of them.

The movie opens with the two girls working at their sewing machines and they start to talk about caning.  The company has lost a major account because of mistakes they made in the aftermath of Jane’s birthday party and they have been told that they will have to accept a caning or be fired.  The both decide that they need their jobs so the plan to take the punishment.  Their supervisor enters and asks what they have decided.  It is decided that they will be punished at lunch and the supervisor leaves.  A little more conversation follows then, after a fade out, their supervisor returns carrying a cane.

She orders them to stand so she can lift and pin up both of their dresses before giving both a rather ordinary hand spanking, Louise first and then Jan who seems to get a longer spanking.  Next comes the cane.  First, Louise bends over a stool and she receives 10 quick strokes that seem quite light. Jane follows and she also receives 10 strokes that don’t leave any visible marks.  But it was Jane's 22nd birthday celebration the previous Friday that lead to the mistakes so that calls for a further 22 strokes.  A few of these look a little harder than the earlier strokes but they still don’t leave any visible marks.  After the canings, the supervisor leaves them to stand against a wall with their dresses up for the rest of their lunch hour.  All of this has taken about 12 minutes.

The girl’s manager walks in while they are consoling each other.  They tell him what has happened and he sends them off just as their supervisor returns.  He decides that she deserves a little of her own medicine so he has her take her skirt off and then kneel on a chair for a hand spanking that is longer and obviously harder than the spankings she had administered earlier.  With about 2 minutes left in the movie, he decides to move on to the cane.  He has her stand and touch her toes while he administers over a hundred quick strokes that aren’t much harder than those she had delivered earlier before the movie fades to black.

This movie looks like what it is, an early attempt that falls far short of what would come later.  The story is simple, the set is crowded which leads to poor camera positions and the action is timid.  It doesn’t help that time was not kind to the videotapes so there was significant deterioration in the early half of this movie before it was digitized.  This movie is interesting as a historical piece but there isn’t much other reason to watch it.