Public Reel

Little Men · Beat 29 · permalink

Carnival booth

9:32–9:51 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 9:359:35Frame at 9:419:41Frame at 9:459:45Frame at 9:499:49

Play from 9:32 on the Internet Archive This passage on the film's page

Evidence and details

Starts here: topic shift in dialogue. Sequence 17 · shots 67–70. Observations cite a frame (frame:n) or a time (t:m:ss); frames are the sampled ones above.

Place
carnival_booth (other, exterior) evidence: frame:1
People
  • man wearing a top hat and dark coat, standing visible
  • man seated in a chair, wearing a suit, later lying back with tongue out visible, audible
  • man seated in a chair, wearing a suit, looking up at p1 visible
Seen happening
  • A man in a top hat stands beside a carnival booth. [frame:1]
  • A man lies back in a chair with his tongue out while another man points at his head. [frame:2]
  • The man in the top hat gestures toward the seated man. [frame:3]
  • The seated man lies back with his tongue out. [frame:4]
Also said
“Stick out your tongue!” 9:45 · “Stick out your tongue.” 9:48
Seen
carnival booth sign, bottles, top hat, chair, curtains
On screen
[{'text': 'SPECIAL PRICE ONLY $1.00', 'frame': 1}, {'text': 'NORMAL BRAIN', 'frame': 1}, {'text': 'WHISKEY BRAIN', 'frame': 1}]
Interpretation
Model opinion, not evidence: mood: comedic and theatrical; themes: carnival entertainment, mock medical examination, alcohol's effects; style notes: black-and-white, medium shots, staged for performance, bright lighting on subjects

A man in a top hat addresses a seated man at a carnival booth advertising brain tests and whiskey, while another man lies back in a chair with his tongue out. The transcript includes commands like 'Stick out your tongue!' and an exclamation about 'the curse of booze.'

“Boo!” 9:32 · “The curse of booze! Look! Look at that bleary red-rimmed, bloodshot eye!” 9:35 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 9:35 (passage 9:32–9:51); US record: No renewal found

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