Punished Thieves

 

‘Punished Thieves’ is a 60-minute video that was originally released by Moonglow North in 2003 under the name ‘Secretarial Tea-Leaf’.  It consists of four parts:

1.  The Chastised Thieves (at least that’s the name given on the movie title card but it’s called ‘Thieving Secretary; Sound Caning’ in the on-line catalogue, 33:57) featuring Tom Cooper and a woman identified as Jean in the Moonglow Girls Directory.  This was her first movie but she would go on to make ‘Corporal Cane(s)’ (C48) and ‘The Headmaster’s Study Revisited’ (TM-15) for Top Marks;

2.  The Paddled Cleaner (16:50) featuring an unknown actress who probably never made another movie;

3.  Paddled with the Hairbrush (4:48) featuring Nicky Montford; and

4.  83 strokes for Nicky Montford (5:26) also featuring Nicky Montford.

‘Punished Thieves’ is available on DVD from www.belrose.eu and from several video-on-demand sites including www.hotmovies.com.

This is one of those movies that has an interesting story behind it.  Unfortunately, the story behind the movie is probably more interesting that the movie itself.  Rather than describe this movie I will quote the Moonglow DVD catalogue that is still available on-line and an archived copy of the Moonglow on-line catalogue.

From the DVD catalogue:

“N16: Secretarial Tea-Leaf.  This was meant to be two half hour videos with girls completely new to the scene. In the first part, Peter, a company director, discovers that his secretary has made many unauthorized transactions on the company credit card. In fact, she has worked the card hard in her own interest, and it costs her bottom dear; an interesting debut for a new girl to the scene. The second part is a complete disaster, but interesting as a result. The acting is frankly awful throughout. The girl bottles out near the beginning of the caning. The moral of this part is that making a spanking video is not nearly as easy as so many people think.”

From the on-line catalogue:

“Thieving Secretary; Sound Caning: In the first story, Peter, a company director, discovers that his secretary has made a large number of unauthorised transactions on the company credit card. In fact, she has worked the card hard in her own interest, and it costs her bottom dear. An interesting debut for a then new girl to the scene.

The Paddled Cleaner: The second part is the story of a girl from a cleaning agency, who has light fingers. But she meets her match in Sir Peter Good, who sets a trap for her. Caught bang to rights, she winds up with a soundly smacked and gloriously red bottom.  A quite a scene for a CP Novice!

Finally, we have two superb clips starring the extraordinary Nicky Montford.

Paddled with the Hairbrush: Student Felicity likes staying with her step mother's father, Robert, while her parents are overseas. The kindly gentleman is normally a soft touch for most things that Felicity wants or likes. But when she insists that he learns to text on his new mobile phone, she generates a rebellion. Having made the effort, Robert finds that Felicity seldom bothers to reply to his texts. This irritates him no end and one day he joins Felicity, with a hairbrush in hand. This amuses her no end as he is bald. But he has other uses for it. To Felicity's absolute shock, he hauls her over his knees and gives her a sound spanking with the hairbrush. She has learnt a long overdue lesson; hairbrushes are multi-purpose!” 

83 strokes for Nicky Montford: Sixth former Nicky Montford is a riding fanatic. But when she is gated for the week-end, she still goes riding and is reported to Dr Wendlebury, her house master. He is furious with her attitude and makes her bend over for a beating. He starts with her own riding crop and applies forty strokes across her bottom. But her attitude does not improve; she even calls him by his nickname, Wendy. He substitutes the crop for the cane and then gives her a veritable thrashing. 83 strokes whip across her bottom before he sends her off. Nicky lives up to her reputation as a truly tough cookie in this one.”

I find it interesting that the on-line catalogue devoted as many words to the descriptions of the each of the two 5-minute Nicky Montford scenes at the end of the movie as it did to the two much longer earlier scenes combined (58, 58, 129 and 115 respectively).

George Harlow writes about the decision to change the title of this movie in ‘The Story of Moonglow: The Videos’, The LSF Wellred Weekly, Vol. 1, No. 12: Dec. 7, 2012 (http://www.wellredweekly.com/):

“At the end of the day, the irony was that good titles sold. Get the title wrong and the video tanked. Get a good title, and it flew out the door. We issued one video called Secretarial Tea-leaf. It had the worst sales ever. Fifteen years later it was renamed Punished Thieves, and it far outsold the original issue. Put the word housemaster in the title and the sky is the limit (at least sometimes.) As time wore on, we took more and more care of titling.”

This quote does raise questions about the dating of this movie.  I used 2003 which comes from the 2011 version of the Moonglow DVD catalogue.  In the 2012 article Harlow suggests that this movie was made at least 15 years earlier which would put the filming sometime in the nineties but I’ve seen nothing else that suggests Nicky Montford was making videos much before 2003.

The first sequence, ‘The Chastised Thieves’, is a simple two hander of a boss punishing his secretary who has abused the company credit card.  There isn’t much to say about it.  It is exactly what you might expect and, while there is nothing wrong with it aside from some uninspired camera work, there is nothing terribly interesting in it either.

The second sequence, ‘The Paddled Cleaner’, is more interesting but not in a good way.  The acting is poor even by spanking movie standards, there is a lot of inappropriate smiling and an almost uncountable number of flubbed lines then it just falls apart.  It is 17-minutes long but it was intended to be 30-minutes.  The first 6-1/2 minutes are set-up, literally, a home owner plants money to catch a cleaner he suspects of theft in the act.  So, as is usual in movies like this, the cleaner agrees to corporal punishment if the homeowner and her employer don’t call the police.  The punishment starts with about 3-1/2 minutes of hand spanking and then continues with a small wooden paddle.  At one point during the paddling (at about the 11-minute mark of the segment) you can hear the director telling the actress to look at the camera and then he counts them back into action, this probably should have been cut and it is the first indication that things are going wrong.

The strap is next.  After the first half dozen strokes of the strap there are growing indications of
resistance from the actress and a few bits of almost inaudible conversation between the performers.  She breaks position twice during the second half-dozen strokes of the leather strap from her employer and she looks like she is about to refuse when the home owner brings out a studded strap.  She does eventually bend over a chair for the studded strap but she doesn’t stay there long.  She breaks position again after one stroke and you can hear her say “no we can’t” afterward.  She returns to position for a few more strokes but then walks away again with a clearly audible “what the fuck was that” followed by “you bitches”.  The camera has trouble keeping up with her as she walks around for a minute or two. There is another mention of the cane but the segment ends abruptly before the promised caning ever begins.  I can only assume the actress refused to continue but that isn’t shown.

The final two short scenes with Nicky Montford are the best part of the movie but they simply aren’t enough to save it.

This movie simply isn’t very good.  The second segment is a train wreck but it is interesting in its own way, much like looking at a car accident as you drive by.  Other movies have been impacted by a performer refusing to continue, the RGE/Lupus movie ‘Wild Party 3’ comes to mind, but I’ve never seen one fall apart so obviously before.  I almost wish the segment had been allowed to run for another few minutes so we could see the final collapse.  That might have made the movie worthwhile but, as it is, there is really no reason to watch this movie.