Public Reel

Water Rustlers · Beat 139 · permalink

Private office

27:31–28:07 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). 4 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 27:3227:32Frame at 27:4427:44Frame at 28:0228:02

Play from 27:31 on the Internet Archive This passage on the film's page

Evidence and details

Starts here: topic shift in dialogue. Sequence 82 · shots 246–248. 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, middle-aged, wearing a vest and tie, visible in group visible
  • woman, blonde, wearing Western-style vest and shirt visible, audible
  • man, wearing cowboy hat, light shirt, dark pants, walking outdoors visible
Seen happening
  • A group of people are gathered indoors listening to a discussion about cattle and water rights. [frame:1]
  • A man in a cowboy hat walks outside near a stone structure. [frame:3]
Mentioned
  • The group contends that destroying Silver Creek is illegal. [t:27:53]
Also said
“But we do want him restrained from taking what is our inalienable right.” 27:41 · “He's destroyed Silver Creek.” 27:53
Seen
wooden wall, stone structure, wooden bench
Interpretation
Model opinion, not evidence: mood: tense; themes: property rights, community conflict, environmental destruction; style notes: black-and-white, medium shots, static framing, Western costume design

A group of people, including a woman in Western attire, are shown in an indoor setting discussing water rights and the destruction of Silver Creek. A man in a cowboy hat is seen walking outside near a stone structure.

“There's enough water for everyone.” 27:33 · “We haven't any wish to deprive Mr. Whalen of the right to do whatever he wishes on his property.” 27:35 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 Water Rustlers (1938) at 27:32 (passage 27:31–28:07); US record: No renewal found

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