Public Reel

Little Men · Beat 66 · permalink

Private office

20:48–21:37 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 20:5420:54Frame at 21:0821:08Frame at 21:1421:14Frame at 21:3421:34

Play from 20:48 on the Internet Archive This passage on the film's page

Evidence and details

Starts here: pause in speech. Sequence 31 · shots 172–177. 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, dark suit, standing, adult visible, audible
  • Miss Jo (named at t:21:33): woman, patterned dress, seated, adult visible, audible
  • woman, checkered dress, standing, adult visible, audible
Seen happening
  • The man turns and walks toward a doorway. [frame:2]
  • The woman in the patterned dress adjusts her clothing. [frame:3]
  • A second woman enters and asks if they sent for the undertaker. [frame:4]
Also said
“I can just be you in the guise of a collector.” 21:11 · “Yes, sir. Did you all send for the undertaker?” 21:34
Seen
bookshelves [frame:1], desk [frame:1], lamp [frame:1], curtains [frame:3], wallpaper [frame:4]
Interpretation
Model opinion, not evidence: mood: tense and conversational; themes: debt collection, role-playing, adults as children; style notes: static medium shots, high-contrast lighting, period costumes, interior set with bookshelves and wallpaper

A man and a woman discuss collecting debts in a room with bookshelves; a second woman enters and asks if they sent for the undertaker. The conversation includes references to Tommy Bang's father and a plan to visit Mr. Banks.

“Why do we worry? I'll just collect it.” 20:55 · “Tommy Bang's father? Well, he was very sick, you know.” 21:03 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 20:54 (passage 20:48–21:37); US record: No renewal found

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