Public Reel

Little Men · Beat 149 · permalink

Street

43:27–43:39 Released 1940; registered 1941

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 43:2743:27Frame at 43:3043:30Frame at 43:3643:36

Play from 43:27 on the Internet Archive This passage on the film's page

Evidence and details

Starts here: pause in speech. Sequence 60 · shots 361–363. Observations cite a frame (frame:n) or a time (t:m:ss); frames are the sampled ones above.

Place
street (street, exterior) evidence: frame:2, frame:3
People
  • man wearing a top hat and dark coat, standing visible
  • man seated, wearing a light-colored shirt and vest, appears disheveled visible
Seen happening
  • A man in a top hat stands beside a seated man under a sign. [frame:1]
  • A poster advertises a boxing match between Major L. Burdle and John Barleycorn for $1.00. [frame:2]
  • The standing man gestures while speaking to the seated man. [frame:3]
Seen
poster, top hat, sign
On screen
[{'text': "DOES YOUR LOVED ONE DRINK? CURE HIM WITH BURDLE'S BITTERS PRICE $10.00 PER BOTTLE", 'frame': 2}, {'text': "TODAY ONLY! A FIGHT TO A FINISH! MAJOR L. BURDLE vs JOHN BARLEYCORN HEAR! SEE! AMERICA'S GREATEST WARRIOR IN A KNOCKOUT FIGHT WITH DEMON RUM Everybody Welcome", 'frame': 2}, {'text': 'SPECIAL TODAY ONLY $1.00', 'frame': 3}]
Interpretation
Model opinion, not evidence: mood: somber, critical; themes: alcoholism, public spectacle, social commentary; style notes: black-and-white, medium shots, outdoor setting with props and signage used for exposition

A man in a top hat stands beside a seated man under a sign advertising a boxing match and a drink. A voice-over describes a 'rum sodden wreck' and questions if he was once a man. The scene includes a poster with text about a fight and a price.

“Look at this rum sodden wreck. Would you believe he was once a man?” 43:28 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 Little Men (1940) at 43:27 (passage 43:27–43:39); US record: No renewal found

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