Public Reel

Little Men · Beat 237 · permalink

Street

1:09:27–1:10:01 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 1:09:371:09:37Frame at 1:09:481:09:48Frame at 1:09:521:09:52Frame at 1:09:571:09:57

Play from 1:09:27 on the Internet Archive This passage on the film's page

Evidence and details

Starts here: pause in speech. Sequence 110 · shots 562–565. Observations cite a frame (frame:n) or a time (t:m:ss); frames are the sampled ones above.

Place
street (street, exterior) evidence: frame:1
People
  • man in top hat, dark suit, bow tie, holding a telegram; appears middle-aged, average build visible, audible
  • man in bowler hat, vest, bow tie; mustache, middle-aged, average build visible, audible
Seen happening
  • A man in a top hat gestures while speaking to another man seated on a bench. [frame:1]
  • The two men stand close, conversing intently; one holds a telegram. [frame:2]
  • The seated man looks upward while holding a telegram, appearing exasperated. [frame:3]
  • The two men face each other again, continuing their conversation. [frame:4]
Also said
“moved to Leavenworth.” 69:49 · “Shall I forward it? Yeah, in about 20 years.” 69:50
Seen
telegram [frame:2], top hat [frame:1], bowler hat [frame:3], US MAIL box [frame:4], street lamp [frame:1]
Interpretation
Model opinion, not evidence: mood: frustrated and tense; themes: debt and obligation, communication failure, nostalgia for past favors; style notes: static medium shots, high-contrast lighting, period costumes, staged blocking

Two men in formal 19th-century attire converse on a street; one holds a telegram and expresses concern about locating someone who has moved. The dialogue reveals a failed attempt to contact debtors via telegrams, with one recipient having relocated to Leavenworth.

“It's awful, Willie, awful.” 69:27 · “I'd rather lose my right arm than have his faith in me destroyed. You can't go back to Plumfield till you get that Mazuma.” 69:29 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 1:09:37 (passage 1:09:27–1:10:01); US record: No renewal found

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