Public Reel

Bowery at Midnight · Beat 17 · permalink

Private office

17:50–20:52 Registered 1942

Machine annotation by Qwen/Qwen3-VL-235B-A22B-Instruct, cut beats-0.2, prompt beats-0.2. Machine checks passed. 4 quotes checked against the transcript; 7 names checked for a spoken or on-screen source; 1 of 1 visible events checked against a frame. Not human-reviewed. Observations and transcript may still be wrong.

Frame at 19:2119:21

Play from 17:50 on the Internet Archive This passage on the film's page

Evidence and details

Starts here: cutting rhythm changes. Sequence 11 · shots 26–26. Observations cite a frame (frame:n) or a time (t:m:ss); frames are the sampled ones above.

Place
private_office (private office, interior) evidence: frame:1
People
  • silhouetted figure in dark clothing, visible only as a shadowy outline visible
  • Sergeant Crawford (named at t:19:31): unseen, but audible; voice suggests adult male audible
  • Captain Mitchell (named at t:19:31): unseen, but audible; voice suggests adult male audible
  • Mr. Wagner (named at t:20:07): unseen, but audible; voice suggests adult male audible
  • Burks (named at t:18:00): unseen, but audible; voice suggests adult male audible
  • Frankie Mills (named at t:18:25): unseen, but audible; voice suggests adult male audible
  • Pete (named at t:18:34): unseen, but audible; voice suggests adult male audible
Seen happening
  • A man is visible in silhouette in a dark room. [frame:1]
Also said
“Hello, this is Sergeant Crawford. Give me Captain Mitchell right away.” 19:31 · “I'm sorry, Mr. Wagner. I didn't mean to disturb you. You never disturb me.” 20:07
Seen
silhouetted figure
Interpretation
Model opinion, not evidence: mood: tense and shadowy; themes: crime, authority, moral responsibility; style notes: low-key lighting, high contrast, silhouetted figure suggests noir influence

A man is seen in a dimly lit interior as dialogue references crime, a corned beef sandwich, and a character named Burks; a phone call to Sergeant Crawford and Captain Mitchell follows. The scene ends with a character saying they are going to leave.

“How about a nice corned beef sandwich? Well, that's the deal, but this time the treat's on me. Go, Burks. Go, Burks it is.” 18:00 · “Why, that hooch Frankie Mills.” 18:25 automatic transcript, may be wrong

The record

No renewal found 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. Evidence dossier. The finding concerns the US copyright record for the film; it is not clearance for any use, and this page's annotation is machine output.

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Frame from Bowery at Midnight (1942) at 19:21 (passage 17:50–20:52); US record: No renewal found

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