Public Reel

The Phantom Creeps · Beat 1 · permalink

Beat 1

0:00–1:52 Registered 1939

Machine annotation by Qwen/Qwen3-VL-235B-A22B-Instruct, cut beats-0.2, prompt beats-0.2. Machine checks flagged: name not grounded. 4 quotes checked against the transcript; 2 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 0:560:56

Play from 0:00 on the Internet Archive This passage on the film's page

Evidence and details

Starts here: start of film. Sequence 1 · shots 0–0. Observations cite a frame (frame:n) or a time (t:m:ss); frames are the sampled ones above.

People
  • Man in dark suit and bow tie, middle-aged, heavy-set, serious expression visible
  • Edward Van Sloan (named at frame:1): Man in fedora and dark suit, older, thin face, stern expression visible
Also said
“I created it.” 1:33 · “You whom I have escaped from present.” 1:42
Seen
on-screen text identifying actors
On screen
VAN SLOAN
Interpretation
Model opinion, not evidence: mood: tense; themes: control, escape, confrontation; style notes: split-screen composition, high-contrast lighting, studio-shot close-ups

Two men are shown in a split-screen shot; one is identified by on-screen text as Edward Van Sloan. Dialogue suggests a confrontation over control of a dangerous device. No location or time of day is established.

“My control board.” 1:20 · “Dr. Sarkin.” 1:21 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 The Phantom Creeps (1939) at 0:56 (passage 0:00–1:52); US record: No renewal found

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