Public Reel

The Phantom Creeps · Beat 42 · permalink

Sidewalk

20:27–21:16 Registered 1939

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; 6 names checked for a spoken or on-screen source; 1 of 2 visible events checked against a frame. Not human-reviewed. Observations and transcript may still be wrong.

Frame at 20:3520:35Frame at 20:5920:59

Play from 20:27 on the Internet Archive This passage on the film's page

Evidence and details

Starts here: pause in speech. Sequence 27 · shots 58–59. Observations cite a frame (frame:n) or a time (t:m:ss); frames are the sampled ones above.

Place
sidewalk (sidewalk, exterior) evidence: frame:1
People
  • woman with light hair, wearing a light-colored blouse and dark skirt visible, audible
  • man in dark suit and fedora visible
  • man in police uniform with cap visible
  • man in dark coat, partially visible visible
  • unseen speaker, likely doctor audible
  • Captain Wells (named at t:20:41): unseen speaker, likely Captain Wells audible
Seen happening
  • A woman lies on the ground near a motorcycle and a vehicle. [frame:1]
  • A woman stands facing two men, one in uniform. [frame:2]
Also said
“The man seemed to be in a coma. That's right. He collapsed suddenly at the control. The ambulance is coming. Take this girl away. Come on, lady. Captain West, I want to know the connection between this plane crash and Dr. Zorka's death. Unless you tell me... All right, arrest her. Leave go of me. You can't arrest me without a charge. The charger was throwing away in a government plane. Come on.” 20:53 · “You can't do this to me. No, I can't, but he can.” 21:13
Seen
motorcycle, vehicle, police uniform, fedora
Interpretation
Model opinion, not evidence: mood: tense and urgent; themes: authority vs. press, sudden death and investigation, arrest and protest; style notes: black-and-white, medium shots, outdoor natural lighting, static camera

A woman is declared dead after collapsing in a plane; a reporter confronts Captain Wells while police prepare to arrest her. A doctor reports no bodily injury, and the scene ends with the reporter protesting her arrest.

“Woman is dead.” 20:30 · “Captain Wells, my paper would like an official statement from you. What were you doing in that plane? Following you to get a story.” 20:41 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.

Share

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 The Phantom Creeps (1939) at 20:35 (passage 20:27–21:16); 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/ThePhantomCreeps/b42.png
Figure for a newsletter or page
Cite