Public Reel

Water Rustlers · Beat 171 · permalink

Private office

33:48–33:57 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; 2 names checked for a spoken or on-screen source; 0 of 4 visible events checked against a frame. Not human-reviewed. Observations and transcript may still be wrong.

Frame at 33:5033:50Frame at 33:5233:52Frame at 33:5533:55Frame at 33:5733:57

Play from 33:48 on the Internet Archive This passage on the film's page

Evidence and details

Starts here: pause in speech. Sequence 102 · shots 307–310. 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
  • blonde woman, wearing a light shirt and dark vest, holding a gun visible
  • Wiley (named at t:33:56): man with dark hair, wearing a light shirt, standing then falling visible
Seen happening
  • Woman holds a gun pointed at a man. [frame:1]
  • Man turns away, back to camera, wearing a cowboy hat. [frame:2]
  • Man falls to the floor, appearing injured or shot. [frame:3]
  • Woman and man stand facing each other again, gun still in hand. [frame:4]
Seen
gun [frame:1], cowboy hat [frame:2], patterned rug [frame:1], wooden wall [frame:1]
Interpretation
Model opinion, not evidence: mood: tense; themes: confrontation, retribution, power imbalance; style notes: medium close-ups, static framing, high-contrast lighting typical of 1930s Westerns

A woman holds a gun on a man in a wooden room with a patterned rug; the man is later seen falling to the floor. The transcript includes a warning not to reach for something and a comment that Wiley deserves what he gets.

“Don't reach for it.” 33:49 · “Wiley's got it coming to him.” 33:56 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 33:50 (passage 33:48–33:57); US record: No renewal found

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