Winds of the Wasteland
WINDS OF THE WASTELAND. 1936. 6 reels.
No renewal found Free in the US since 1 January 1965, on the registry's reading: registration LP6450 of 1936 by Republic Pictures Corp was not renewed in the volumes searched.
Finding revision d78919d3, first recorded 5 September 2026. A revision id changes when the finding, its reason or its linked renewals change.
Producer, Nat Levine; supervision, Paul Malvern; director, Mack V. Wright; screenplay and original story, Joseph Poland.
Registration LP6450 No renewal found
- Term began
- 1936-07-06
- Claimant
- Republic Pictures Corp
- Class
- LP — published photoplay (numbering series begun Sept. 1928)
- Finding
- no renewal entry found for 1963-1965 in the CCE motion-picture renewal sections
- Conditional date
- 1 January 1965, if no renewal was filed. The automated search result requires verification against the linked volumes.
Inspect the catalog entry and source text
An automated finding, not a verdict. A renewal would have appeared in the Copyright Office's renewal registrations 27 to 29 years after the term began. Those volumes are loaded and our parse of them found no matching renewal. If that is right, a work published 1931–1963 that was not renewed entered the public domain at the end of its 28th year; the volumes are OCR of old print, and the method page reports how often the parse has been found to miss one.
A renewal had to be filed in the 28th year and would be listed in the 1963 or 1964 volume; volumes searched: 1963, 1964, 1965.
About this film
John Wayne’s displaced Pony Express rider tries to make a living where the telegraph has made his old skills redundant.
The first force to defeat John Wayne in Winds of the Wasteland is not an outlaw but the telegraph.4 John Blair’s skill as a rider cannot preserve his job once messages no longer need to travel on horseback.5 The film turns this displacement into the beginning of another enterprise. Blair and his fellow rider, played by Lane Chandler, try to establish a stagecoach route.5 Its Western landscape is therefore more than territory to cross or conquer. It is a place in which people must find a reason for traffic to stop.
The film builds its story from a change in communications rather than a feud or a pursuit.4 The Pony Express supplies the heroes with qualifications for work that has ceased to exist. Their knowledge of the country must now serve a business of their own. Wayne’s Blair belongs to the familiar Western world of practical competence. The stagecoach scheme gives that competence a commercial test, making a livelihood depend on whether other people need what the riders can offer. Courage alone cannot supply passengers.
That dependence gives the encounters away from the horses some weight. At 23:42 in the atlas copy, two people converse outside a building while others gather nearby. One person carries a child. The machine transcript gives the line, “The child needs a rest.” The exchange brings the settlement down to the scale of a bodily need: somewhere to stop and receive attention. It also interrupts any easy equation between progress and speed. For these former express riders, the new undertaking requires not simply getting somewhere quickly but making somewhere worth reaching.
A rival stagecoach company tries to stop them.5 The opposition is organised on the same practical scale as the undertaking. At 30:48, a man in a dark coat stands behind an interior counter. The transcript indicates an instruction to prepare men for action. The threat comes through an instruction rather than an eruption of anger. Obstruction takes the form of ordinary business conducted indoors, at a distance from the road where its consequences will be felt. Blair’s attempt to build a livelihood meets another operator’s power to direct men against him. The film’s action is one means by which its business contest is conducted.
When a horse-drawn wagon travels along the dusty road at 43:31, the open country becomes the working surface of that contest. The vehicle has to cover actual ground. An enterprise discussed in town depends on the passage between settlements, with the effort visible in the moving wagon. Against the telegraph’s displacement of the riders, the image preserves a distinction the premise needs. Passengers still require transport even when messages have found another way to travel. The Western’s customary movement through landscape becomes the substance of the characters’ work.
The film’s later circulation presents a different problem of passage. One Internet Archive copy carries a Public Domain Mark 1.0 usage statement.9 A usage label attached to an offered copy does not establish the history of its copyright. The absence of a renewal is also reported in a Republic-library filmography.8 That remains a secondary account. The film has circulated internationally on DVD in a condensed version retitled The Stagecoach.10 That title shifts attention from the wasteland to the vehicle. The condensation raises a more material distinction: finding the film and finding it complete are different achievements.
The record: Registration LP6450 by Republic Pictures Corp is dated 6 July 1936. The registry found no renewal in the renewal volumes for 1963 to 1965, nor in the Copyright Office's records from 1978 on; on that reading the term ended on 31 December 1964 and the film has been free in the US since 1 January 1965. The record does not settle the provenance or completeness of any particular circulating copy.
Written 6 September 2026 by gpt-6-astra from the registry record, the atlas's own evidence and the sources below, which were gathered by Qwen/Qwen3.8-Max with web search and questioned by deepseek-ai/DeepSeek-V4-Pro. Numbered notes are the sources; a claim marked unverified has no source yet. How these are made and checked.
- catalog.afi.com https://catalog.afi.com/Film/7921-WINDS-OF-THE-WASTELAND?cxt=filmography
- catalog.afi.com https://catalog.afi.com/Search?searchField=ReleaseDate&searchText=6%20July%201936&sortT...
- en.wikipedia.org https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winds_of_the_Wasteland
- catalog.afi.com https://catalog.afi.com/Film/7921-WINDS-OFTHEWASTELAND?sid=b13ffdb3-d5dd-43e2-b12b-59e8...
- archive.org https://archive.org/details/Winds_of_the_Wasteland
- catalog.afi.com https://catalog.afi.com/Catalog/PersonDetails/125311
- rottentomatoes.com https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/winds-of-the-wasteland
- dukefilmography.com https://dukefilmography.com/republic_pictures_library.html
- archive.org https://archive.org/details/WINDSOFTHEWASTELANDVideoQualityUpgrade
- dukefilmography.com https://dukefilmography.com/john_wayne_dvd_filmography.html
- simple.wikipedia.org https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Wayne
Catalog entry
Catalog of Copyright Entries, Motion Pictures 1912–1939 (Library of Congress, 1951), Project Gutenberg #51836, lines 272115–272121.
WINDS OF THE WASTELAND. 1936. 6 reels.
Credits: Producer, Nat Levine; supervision, Paul Malvern; director,
Mack V. Wright; screenplay and original story, Joseph Poland.
© Republic Pictures Corp.; 6Jul36; LP6450.
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Copies on the Internet Archive
| Item | Year | Downloads | Collection |
|---|---|---|---|
| Winds of the Wasteland | 1936 | 257,369 | feature_films_unsorted, feature_films |
| Winds of the Wasteland | 1936 | 133 | movie_trailers_unsorted, movie_trailers |
| 1936 - Winds of the Wasteland | 1936 | 84 | opensource_movies, fav-wolvemarine |
Matched by title and year on 5 September 2026; check that the item is this film and not a remake or a trailer.
Search the Internet Archive yourself · JSON
Shot atlas
390 shots over 55:41 in the Internet Archive copy Winds_of_the_Wasteland, 2 with readable on-screen text. Every shot, with timestamps · JSON