Public Reel

The Phantom Creeps · Beat 50 · permalink

Laboratory

26:31–28:08 Registered 1939

Machine annotation by Qwen/Qwen3-VL-235B-A22B-Instruct, cut beats-0.2, prompt beats-0.2. Machine checks passed (partial). 4 quotes checked against the transcript; 4 names checked for a spoken or on-screen source; 0 of 2 visible events checked against a frame. Not human-reviewed. Observations and transcript may still be wrong.

Frame at 27:1727:17Frame at 28:0528:05

Play from 26:31 on the Internet Archive This passage on the film's page

Evidence and details

Starts here: pause in speech. Sequence 34 · shots 72–73. Observations cite a frame (frame:n) or a time (t:m:ss); frames are the sampled ones above.

Place
laboratory (laboratory, interior) evidence: frame:1
People
  • woman in dark dress and hat, standing visible
  • boy in light shirt and dark pants, standing visible
  • Dr. Valerie (named at t:27:09): man in light lab coat, reaching toward woman's neck visible
  • man in dark coat, standing beside car visible
Seen happening
  • A man in a lab coat grabs a woman by the throat while a boy watches. [frame:1]
  • A man in a dark coat stands beside a convertible car. [frame:2]
Also said
“Hands at my throat.” 27:19 · “Oh, my God.” 27:23
Seen
lab coat [frame:1], convertible car [frame:2], beaker on stand [frame:1], hat [frame:1]
Interpretation
Model opinion, not evidence: mood: tense; themes: scientific danger, suspense, threat; style notes: static medium shots, high contrast lighting, period costumes

In a laboratory, a man in a lab coat appears to choke a woman while a boy looks on; later, a man in a coat stands beside a convertible car outside. No names are spoken that identify the individuals.

“What's the matter, Dr. Valerie? Oh, perhaps it was...” 27:09 · “Fumes and the liquid, but it comes with no reversal.” 27:16 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 27:17 (passage 26:31–28:08); US record: No renewal found

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