Public Reel

Water Rustlers · Beat 153 · permalink

Private office

30:28–30:46 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 30:3630:36Frame at 30:4530:45

Play from 30:28 on the Internet Archive This passage on the film's page

Evidence and details

Starts here: pause in speech. Sequence 90 · shots 273–274. 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 in light shirt, cowboy hat, holding a gun, standing visible
  • man in dark coat and hat, standing visible
  • man in suit and tie, reclining with feet on desk visible
Seen happening
  • A man in a light shirt holds a gun while standing near a desk. [frame:1]
  • A man in a suit reclines with his feet on a desk while two others stand nearby. [frame:2]
Seen
gun, desk, cowboy hats on wall, patterned rug on wall, feet on desk
Interpretation
Model opinion, not evidence: mood: tense and confrontational; themes: authority, negotiation, western genre tropes; style notes: static medium shot, high-contrast lighting, western costume and set design

Three men are in a room with western-style decor; one stands holding a gun, another stands in dark coat, and a third reclines with feet on a desk. A transcript line mentions talking to cowherders, suggesting a plan is being discussed.

“There are no witnesses to testify tomorrow.” 30:32 · “I got a way of talking to those cowherders that'll make them listen.” 30:41 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 30:36 (passage 30:28–30:46); US record: No renewal found

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