Public Reel

The Sign of Four · Beat 154 · permalink

Private office

54:02–54:33 Registered 1932

Machine annotation by Qwen/Qwen3-VL-235B-A22B-Instruct, cut beats-0.2, prompt beats-0.2. Not yet checked. The automatic checks have not run on this beat. Not human-reviewed. Observations and transcript may still be wrong.

Frame at 54:1854:18

Play from 54:02 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 63 · shots 309–309. 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:1
People
  • man in light shirt and dark vest, clean-shaven, medium build visible, audible
  • man in dark coat and bowler hat, heavier build, mustache visible, audible
  • Tonga (named at t:54:23): not visible mentioned
  • Dr. Watson (named at t:54:31): not visible mentioned, audible
Also said
“You and Tonga.” 54:23 · “I, Dr. Watson.” 54:31
Seen
bowler hat [frame:1], dark coat [frame:1], light shirt [frame:1], vest [frame:1]
Interpretation
Model opinion, not evidence: mood: tense and conspiratorial; themes: loyalty, confinement, secret plans; style notes: close two-shot, high contrast lighting, static framing

Two men face each other in a dim interior; one speaks of staying at a fun fair and mentions Tonga, then Dr. Watson is announced and invited in. No named characters are visually identifiable beyond the spoken reference to Dr. Watson.

“I'm only trying to have a knock in the old block.” 54:04 · “We stay right here in the fun fair.” 54:17 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 Sign of Four (1932) at 54:18 (passage 54:02–54:33); US record: No renewal found

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