Public Reel

The Phantom Creeps · Beat 94 · permalink

Private office

54:15–54:33 Registered 1939

Machine annotation by Qwen/Qwen3-VL-235B-A22B-Instruct, cut beats-0.2, prompt beats-0.2. Machine checks passed (partial). 2 quotes checked against the transcript; 2 names checked for a spoken or on-screen source; 1 of 3 visible events checked against a frame. Not human-reviewed. Observations and transcript may still be wrong.

Frame at 54:1554:15Frame at 54:2154:21Frame at 54:3054:30

Play from 54:15 on the Internet Archive This passage on the film's page

Evidence and details

Starts here: pause in speech; cut falls inside a spoken line: no pause was available without exceeding the length cap. Sequence 66 · shots 130–132. Observations cite a frame (frame:n) or a time (t:m:ss); frames are the sampled ones above.

Place
private_office (private office, interior) evidence: frame:3
People
  • wearing dark clothing, holding a gun, visible from waist up visible
  • wearing dark clothing, standing behind p1, partially obscured visible
Seen happening
  • A rectangular device with a circular feature is mounted on a wall. [frame:1]
  • A dark, indistinct interior space is shown. [frame:2]
  • A person holds a gun while another stands behind them. [frame:3]
Seen
gun, wall-mounted device with circular feature
Interpretation
Model opinion, not evidence: mood: tense; themes: conflict, technology, power; style notes: high-contrast lighting, medium close-up framing, static camera

A person holds a gun while another stands behind them in a dimly lit interior. A device with a circular feature is shown on a wall. The transcript includes lines about protecting enemies and the power of science and genius.

“Protecting my enemies. Stand back.” 54:21 · “Science and genius combined. There's nothing that can withstand its power.” 54:25 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 54:15 (passage 54:15–54:33); US record: No renewal found

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