Public Reel

Phantom of Chinatown · Beat 95 · permalink

Switchboard office

43:50–45:35 Registered 1940

Machine annotation by Qwen/Qwen3-VL-235B-A22B-Instruct, cut beats-0.2, prompt beats-0.2. Machine checks flagged: visible event not seen. 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 44:3644:36Frame at 45:2845:28

Play from 43:50 on the Internet Archive This passage on the film's page

Evidence and details

Starts here: pause in speech; cut falls inside a spoken line: no pause was available without exceeding the length cap. Sequence 73 · shots 180–181. Observations cite a frame (frame:n) or a time (t:m:ss); frames are the sampled ones above.

Place
switchboard office (other, interior) evidence: frame:1
People
  • Mr. Wong (named at t:43:51): man in fedora and suit, medium build visible, audible
  • Captain Street (named at t:44:02): man in fedora and suit, standing at counter visible, audible
  • Rose (named at t:44:00): woman in dark dress, seated at switchboard visible, audible
  • man in dark coat and hat, standing at counter visible, audible
  • woman in dark dress, standing behind Rose visible
  • man in fedora and suit, standing at counter visible
  • man in dark coat, standing at counter visible
Seen happening
  • Rose points to a section on her board indicating the call's origin. [frame:1]
Also said
“We are trying to trace a call to a Mr. Fraser.” 44:05 · “Welcome, please. You like chopsoy? - No, just looking around.” 45:24
Seen
switchboard [frame:1], fedora hats [frame:1, frame:2], counter [frame:2], board with foam plugs [frame:1]
Interpretation
Model opinion, not evidence: mood: investigative and procedural; themes: crime investigation, urban setting, telephone technology; style notes: black-and-white, medium shots, studio lighting, period costumes

A group including a police captain and a man named Mr. Wong consults a woman named Rose at a switchboard to trace a call made by Mr. Fraser. Later, two men enter a chop-suey parlor, where one asks for a table and the other declines food.

“This is Mr. Wong.” 43:51 · “And this gentleman is Captain Street of the San Francisco Police.” 44:02 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 44:36 (passage 43:50–45:35); US record: No renewal found

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