Public Reel

The Phantom Creeps · Beat 9 · permalink

Laboratory

10:14–10:30 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; 2 names checked for a spoken or on-screen source; 0 of 1 visible events checked against a frame. Not human-reviewed. Observations and transcript may still be wrong.

Frame at 10:1510:15Frame at 10:2310:23

Play from 10:14 on the Internet Archive This passage on the film's page

Evidence and details

Starts here: pause in speech. Sequence 4 · shots 11–12. Observations cite a frame (frame:n) or a time (t:m:ss); frames are the sampled ones above.

Place
laboratory (laboratory, interior) evidence: frame:2
People
  • man in dark suit and bow tie, medium build, dark hair, looking upward visible
  • man in light shirt, bearded, laughing, looking upward visible
Seen happening
  • A man laughs while looking upward. [frame:2]
Also said
“I have to change my appearance.” 10:28
Seen
rotary telephone, shelves with bottles and equipment, large circular device with dials
Interpretation
Model opinion, not evidence: mood: tense and conspiratorial; themes: espionage, disguise, pursuit; style notes: medium two-shot, high-contrast lighting, cluttered set suggesting a lab or workshop, static camera

Two men are in a cluttered interior space; one speaks of a government plane closing in and the need to change appearance. The second man laughs while looking upward, and the first man looks up as well.

“That must be far west. The government's plane. They are closing in.” 10:17 · “They will find nothing.” 10:24 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 10:15 (passage 10:14–10:30); US record: No renewal found

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