Public Reel

Phantom of Chinatown · Beat 83 · permalink

Private office

38:24–38:58 Registered 1940

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; 4 names checked for a spoken or on-screen source; no visible events claimed. Not human-reviewed. Observations and transcript may still be wrong.

Frame at 38:4138:41

Play from 38:24 on the Internet Archive This passage on the film's page

Evidence and details

Starts here: pause in speech. Sequence 65 · shots 149–149. 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
  • man wearing a dark suit and fedora, speaking angrily visible, audible
  • man wearing a dark suit and hat, standing with hands clasped visible
  • man in dark suit, holding a hat, looking toward p1 visible
  • man in dark suit, partially obscured, standing behind p3 visible
Also said
“One of your men, Captain? Not as of tomorrow.” 38:44 · “Now make us some tea, fool.” 38:52
Seen
table [frame:1], white chair [frame:1], hat rack with hat [frame:1], door [frame:1]
Interpretation
Model opinion, not evidence: mood: tense and confrontational; themes: authority, dismissal, humiliation; style notes: static medium shot, high-contrast black-and-white lighting, formal framing with characters grouped around a table

Four men stand in a room with a table and a chair; one man in a fedora speaks angrily while another is told to make tea. No names are spoken that identify any of the men, and no time of day or period is established.

“Hey!” 38:36 · “I... I... I... Get out of here, you muttonhead.” 38:38 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 Phantom of Chinatown (1940) at 38:41 (passage 38:24–38:58); US record: No renewal found

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