Public Reel

Phantom of Chinatown · Beat 84 · permalink

Private office

38:58–39:29 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; 2 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 39:1439:14

Play from 38:58 on the Internet Archive This passage on the film's page

Evidence and details

Starts here: pause in speech. Sequence 66 · shots 150–150. 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
  • Jimmy (named at t:38:59): man in dark suit, tie, short hair, medium build visible, audible
  • James Lee Wong (named at t:39:24): man in dark suit, light shirt, medium build, clean-shaven visible, audible
Seen happening
  • Two men stand facing each other in a room. [frame:1]
Also said
“Chinatown exchange, please.” 39:21 · “Now this is James Lee Wong.” 39:24
Seen
door [frame:1], wall sconce [frame:1], suit [frame:1], tie [frame:1]
Interpretation
Model opinion, not evidence: mood: serious, conspiratorial; themes: mystery, cultural secrecy, telephone communication; style notes: medium two-shot, studio lighting, formal attire, static framing

Two men in suits stand in a room and speak; one makes a phone call requesting a connection to Chinatown. The dialogue references a secret of 'eternal fire' and a group of influential Chinese.

“Sorry about having to send that man up here, Jimmy, but you've been so close-mouthed.” 38:59 · “A group of influential Chinese think the secret of eternal fire is vital to the defense of China.” 39:06 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 39:14 (passage 38:58–39:29); US record: No renewal found

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