Public Reel

My Dear Secretary · Beat 24 · permalink

Apartment building entrance

49:10–53:19 Released 1949; registered 1948

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; 12 names checked for a spoken or on-screen source; 0 of 1 visible events checked against a frame. Not human-reviewed. Observations and transcript may still be wrong.

Frame at 51:1451:14

Play from 49:10 on the Internet Archive This passage on the film's page

Evidence and details

Starts here: topic shift in dialogue. Sequence 16 · shots 29–29. Observations cite a frame (frame:n) or a time (t:m:ss); frames are the sampled ones above.

Place
apartment_building_entrance (other, exterior) evidence: frame:1
People
  • man in dark suit, standing with back to camera visible
  • woman in light-colored full-length gown, standing beside p1 visible
  • man in light suit, standing to right of couple visible
  • Steve (named at t:50:20): unseen speaker audible
  • Owen Waterbury (named at t:50:20): unseen speaker audible
  • Ernie (named at t:50:35): unseen speaker audible
  • Rocky (named at t:50:39): unseen speaker audible
  • Felicia (named at t:51:12): unseen speaker audible
  • Mary (named at t:51:37): unseen speaker audible
  • Ronnie (named at t:52:00): unseen speaker audible
  • Mr. Harris (named at t:49:54): unseen speaker audible
  • Mr. Waterbury (named at t:53:13): unseen speaker audible
Seen happening
  • A couple and a man stand at the entrance of a building with luggage. [frame:1]
Also said
“I made a wedding breakfast.” 51:57 · “I have a message for Mr. Waterbury.” 53:13
Seen
luggage, building entrance with steps, chairs visible inside building
Interpretation
Model opinion, not evidence: mood: lighthearted and celebratory with a hint of intrusion; themes: marriage, social intrusion, new beginnings; style notes: medium shot, static framing, high-contrast black-and-white lighting typical of 1940s studio films

A newlywed couple arrives at their apartment building at night, greeted by friends and a driver. A messenger attempts to deliver a message to Mr. Waterbury, but is told he cannot be disturbed.

“Owen Waterbury just married Steve.” 50:20 · “Well, here we are, Ernie. Welcome to Honeymoon Manor.” 50:35 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.

Share

Paste the permalink anywhere that shows link previews and it carries the frame, the time and the finding. The card image can be saved and used with a credit.

Frame from My Dear Secretary (1949) at 51:14 (passage 49:10–53:19); US record: No renewal found

Permalink
always the current cut
Permalink to this version
warns if the beats are recut later
Card image
https://publicreel.org/cards/moment/my_dear_secretary/b24.png
Figure for a newsletter or page
Cite