Phantom of Chinatown · Beat 98 · permalink

Private office

45:42–45:43 Registered 1940

Machine annotation by Qwen/Qwen3-VL-235B-A22B-Instruct, cut beats-0.2, prompt beats-0.2. Machine checks passed. 1 name checked for a spoken or on-screen source; no visible events claimed. Not human-reviewed. Observations and transcript may still be wrong.

45:43

Play from 45:42 on the Internet Archive This passage on the film's page

Evidence and details

Starts here: pause in speech. Sequence 76 · shots 184–184. Observations cite a frame (frame:n) or a time (t:m:ss); frames are the sampled ones above.

Place

(private office, interior) evidence: frame:1

People

man, Asian, wearing a suit, tie, and fedora, mustache, medium build visible

Seen

fedora hat [frame:1], suit and tie [frame:1], wood-paneled wall [frame:1]

Interpretation

Model opinion, not evidence: mood: serious; themes: mystery, film noir; style notes: medium close-up, high-contrast black-and-white lighting, static framing

A man in a suit and fedora is shown in a medium close-up inside a dimly lit room with wood paneling. No dialogue or action is visible in the single frame provided.

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.

Paste the permalink anywhere that shows link previews and it carries the frame, the time and the finding. The card image can be saved and used with a credit.

Frame from Phantom of Chinatown (1940) at 45:43 (passage 45:42–45:43); US record: No renewal found

Permalink: always the current cut
Permalink to this version: warns if the beats are recut later
Card image: https://publicreel.org/cards/moment/Phantom_of_Chinatown_1940/b98.png
Figure for a newsletter or page: <figure><a href="https://publicreel.org/moment/Phantom_of_Chinatown_1940/b98"><img src="https://publicreel.org/atlas-img/Phantom_of_Chinatown_1940/0184.webp" alt="Frame from Phantom of Chinatown (1940) at 45:43 (passage 45:42–45:43); US record: No renewal found" width="640"></a><figcaption>Phantom of Chinatown (1940), 45:42–45:43. Internet Archive copy Phantom_of_Chinatown_1940; US record: No renewal found. Via Public Reel.</figcaption></figure>
Cite: Public Reel, "Phantom of Chinatown (1940), 45:42–45:43", https://publicreel.org/moment/Phantom_of_Chinatown_1940/b98, from Internet Archive item Phantom_of_Chinatown_1940, retrieved 6 September 2026.

Private office

Evidence and details

The record

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