Public Reel

Water Rustlers · Beat 169 · permalink

Private office

32:48–33:19 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; 6 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 32:5932:59Frame at 33:1533:15

Play from 32:48 on the Internet Archive This passage on the film's page

Evidence and details

Starts here: pause in speech. Sequence 102 · shots 301–302. 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, frame:2
People
  • man in Western shirt and tie, seated at table, hat on table visible
  • woman with light hair, wearing vest and blouse, seated at table visible
  • man in shirt and tie, seated at table, hat on table visible
  • man in dark Western shirt and hat, standing, holding gun visible
  • man in light shirt and hat, leaning on desk visible
  • man in shirt and tie, seated at desk visible
Seen happening
  • Three people sit at a table discussing legal action and rallying ranches. [frame:1]
  • Three men are in a room, one standing with a gun, another seated at a desk, and a third leaning on the desk. [frame:2]
Also said
“First, we're going to make a call before we leave town. I'm going to get all the ranches together and find out how we can fight this through. Thank you.” 33:03 · “any more trouble from that crowd I don't think we will either are you sure that we can't” 33:10
Seen
wooden table [frame:1], cowboy hats [frame:1, frame:2], gun [frame:2], desk [frame:2], mounted fish on wall [frame:2], wall hanging with geometric pattern [frame:2]
Interpretation
Model opinion, not evidence: mood: tense and conspiratorial; themes: legal conflict, rancher solidarity, confrontation; style notes: static medium shots, high-contrast black-and-white lighting, Western costume and set design

Three people sit at a wooden table in a rustic interior, discussing legal action and rallying ranches. A second scene shows three men in a similar interior, one standing with a gun, another seated at a desk, and a third leaning on the desk.

“I'm afraid it's no use protesting. The court has the right to decide. But there must be some reason for their absence, and I'm sure Waylon's behind it. First, we'll have to prove it.” 32:50 · “I said there's no way to fight them. Now we are left. Oh, no, we're not.” 32:59 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 32:59 (passage 32:48–33:19); US record: No renewal found

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