Public Reel

His Girl Friday · Beat 54 · permalink

Jail

33:13–34:47 Released 1940; 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; 2 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 33:1633:16Frame at 34:0334:03

Play from 33:13 on the Internet Archive This passage on the film's page

Evidence and details

Starts here: pause in speech. Sequence 8 · shots 142–143. Observations cite a frame (frame:n) or a time (t:m:ss); frames are the sampled ones above.

Place
jail (jail, interior) evidence: frame:1
People
  • woman, dark coat, dark hair, visible through fence visible, audible
  • Earl (named at t:34:09): man, plaid shirt, mustache, visible through fence visible, audible
Seen happening
  • A woman speaks to a man through a chain-link fence. [frame:1]
  • The man and woman continue their conversation, facing each other through the fence. [frame:2]
Also said
“What's a gun for, Earl?” 34:09 · “Miss Molly Molloy.” 34:40
Seen
chain-link fence [frame:1], dark coat [frame:1], plaid shirt [frame:2]
Interpretation
Model opinion, not evidence: mood: tense and conversational; themes: confinement, social commentary, moral justification; style notes: black-and-white, medium close-ups through a fence, high contrast lighting

A woman in a dark coat speaks through a chain-link fence to a man in a plaid shirt; the transcript reveals a conversation about job loss, park visits, and a gun, ending with a mention of roses from Miss Molly Molloy. The setting appears to be a jail cell, with the man inside and the woman outside.

“Sorry about the lipstick girl. Now look after you lost your job.” 33:15 · “Well, there was one fellow. He talked about production for use.” 33:38 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 His Girl Friday (1940) at 33:16 (passage 33:13–34:47); US record: No renewal found

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