Public Reel

Water Rustlers · Beat 136 · permalink

Courtroom

26:29–26:36 Released 1938; registered 1939

Machine annotation by Qwen/Qwen3-VL-235B-A22B-Instruct, cut beats-0.2, prompt beats-0.2. Machine checks passed (partial). 2 quotes checked against the transcript; 3 names checked for a spoken or on-screen source; 0 of 2 visible events checked against a frame. Not human-reviewed. Observations and transcript may still be wrong.

Frame at 26:3126:31Frame at 26:3526:35

Play from 26:29 on the Internet Archive This passage on the film's page

Evidence and details

Starts here: pause in speech. Sequence 82 · shots 235–236. Observations cite a frame (frame:n) or a time (t:m:ss); frames are the sampled ones above.

Place
courtroom (courtroom, interior) evidence: frame:1
People
  • Hutto (named at t:26:29): man, middle-aged, thinning hair, wearing a dark suit and tie, mustache visible
  • woman, blonde, wavy hair, wearing a light shirt and dark vest, raising right hand visible
  • man, older, balding, visible in background left visible
Seen happening
  • A woman raises her right hand while facing a man in a suit. [frame:1]
  • The woman continues to hold her hand up; the man in the suit looks toward her. [frame:2]
Seen
{'item': 'book held by woman', 'frame': 1}, {'item': 'dark suit and tie', 'frame': 1}, {'item': 'light shirt and dark vest', 'frame': 1}
Interpretation
Model opinion, not evidence: mood: solemn; themes: oath-taking, legal proceeding; style notes: medium two-shot, static camera, high-contrast studio lighting, period costume

A man and a woman stand facing each other in what appears to be a courtroom; the woman raises her right hand as if being sworn in. A transcript line confirms an oath is being administered, and the man is addressed as 'sir Hutto'.

“You swear to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, sir Hutto?” 26:29 · “I do.” 26:33 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 Water Rustlers (1938) at 26:31 (passage 26:29–26:36); US record: No renewal found

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