Public Reel

The Phantom Creeps · Beat 56 · permalink

Road

30:31–30:50 Registered 1939

Machine annotation by Qwen/Qwen3-VL-235B-A22B-Instruct, cut beats-0.2, prompt beats-0.2. Machine checks passed (partial). 3 quotes checked against the transcript; 3 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 30:3830:38Frame at 30:4430:44Frame at 30:4730:47Frame at 30:4930:49

Play from 30:31 on the Internet Archive This passage on the film's page

Evidence and details

Starts here: pause in speech. Sequence 39 · shots 79–82. Observations cite a frame (frame:n) or a time (t:m:ss); frames are the sampled ones above.

Place
road (road, exterior) evidence: frame:1
People
  • man wearing a hat and suit, visible in driver's seat visible
  • Bob (named at t:30:36): man wearing a hat and suit, visible in passenger seat visible, audible
  • man wearing a hat and suit, visible in back seat visible
Seen happening
  • Smoke is seen rising near a power pylon. [frame:2]
  • The men in the car look upward toward the smoke. [frame:4]
Also said
“Hey, Bob, look!” 30:44
Seen
convertible car [frame:1], power pylon [frame:2], smoke plume [frame:2]
Interpretation
Model opinion, not evidence: mood: suspenseful; themes: mechanical failure, sudden danger, group reaction; style notes: medium shots of car interior and exterior, cut to wide shot of pylon; high-contrast black-and-white lighting

Three men in a convertible car react to an engine failure and then look up at a smoke plume rising near a power pylon. No names are spoken for the individuals, and the setting is outdoors near utility infrastructure.

“Oh.” 30:35 · “Hey, Bob. What's the matter with this car? The engine stopped running. Plenty of gas.” 30:36 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 30:38 (passage 30:31–30:50); US record: No renewal found

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