0:021 of 1 shots sampled
1. Beat 1
Model synopsis: The beat shows a title card from Favorite Films Corporation. No people, actions, or setting are visible.
A Zane Grey Western reached the screen before its source story appeared in book form, then acquired a tangled paper trail.
The Arizona Raiders appeared in 1936, two years before the recorded book publication of its source story.12 That sequence makes “adaptation” a less straightforward description than it might first appear. It does not establish when Grey wrote the story. The form in which the filmmakers encountered it also remains unclear. What the title card does establish is the prominence of the author’s name: the work announces itself as Zane Grey’s The Arizona Raiders.2 A familiar author’s name can tell us how a picture was presented without telling us how its screenplay took shape.
The picture’s immediate dramatic business is less bibliographical. Laramie Nelson must save himself from a lynching, a predicament the contemporary Billboard review calls a “necktie party.”3 The euphemism turns threatened killing into something almost convivial. For Nelson, the problem is survival. An escape from a rope is a useful premise for a Western because it separates danger from guilt: being pursued or condemned need not make a man the villain. Here the threat offers a more concrete entrance to the film than Grey’s name alone. It places a body in jeopardy before asking the audience to untangle reputations.
The surviving descriptions disagree even about how long that action takes. The running time is recorded as 57 minutes in two entries, including the contemporary review.23 Elsewhere it is given as 64 minutes.4 Those figures should remain discrepancies, not become an invented history of cuts and restorations. Nothing in these entries establishes that the differing durations describe distinct versions. A figure in a catalogue cannot by itself tell us whether footage is missing from a surviving print. The uncertainty concerns what was measured, not just how accurately the result was recorded.
The film’s later identity presents another trap. Heritage Auctions identifies material bearing the title Arizona Raiders as belonging to a 1951 Favorite Films reissue of Arizona Mahoney.8 That is an auction-house attribution concerning another film, not a verified account of Hogan’s picture being reissued on those terms. A later advertisement or poster bearing the shorter title therefore cannot safely be assigned to this film without further examination. Titles are often treated as stable identifiers; in this instance, the same words can point towards two different pictures. The distinction matters particularly when promotional objects survive apart from the prints they once advertised.
The rights search supplies a different kind of afterlife. It should not be made to explain more than it records. The registry’s conclusion concerns the term of protection rather than a chain of subsequent distribution. It does not show who circulated the film or which copies they used. Nor does it establish whether a distributor acted on the same reading of the copyright record. Those questions require evidence of circulation, not merely the absence of a renewal.
The record: Registration LP6445 by Paramount Productions, Inc is dated 26 June 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 rights outside the US. Rights in material added to a later edition also remain outside that finding.
Written 6 September 2026 by gpt-6-astra from the registry record, the atlas's own evidence and the sources below, 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; times open the atlas at that second. How these are made and checked.
- en.wikipedia.org https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Arizona_Raiders
- catalog.afi.com https://catalog.afi.com/Film/4958-THE-ARIZONA-RAIDERS?cxt=filmography
- worldradiohistory.com https://www.worldradiohistory.com/Archive-All-Music/Billboard/30s/1936/BB-1936-09-26.pdf
- archive.org https://archive.org/stream/filmdailyyearboo00film_8/filmdailyyearboo00film_8_djvu.txt
- en.wikipedia.org https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zane_Grey
- catalog.afi.com https://catalog.afi.com/Person/77789-James-Hogan?sid=f2052264-5c1d-4737-9226-3bb362cf23...
- catalog.afi.com https://catalog.afi.com/Person/128172-Raymond-Hatton?sid=0fbb68ee-0201-4820-8904-3d6fda...
- movieposters.ha.com https://movieposters.ha.com/c/search-results.zx?N=54+790+231&Nty=1&Ntt=Arizona+Raiders&...
- en.wikipedia.org https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_American_films_of_1936
The Dark Hour 
Secret Agent 
The Milky Way 
Disorder in the Court 
Scrooge 
Bar-Z Bad Men 
Randy Rides Alone 
The Lucky Texan