Public Reel

Water Rustlers · Beat 176 · permalink

Private office

34:22–34:38 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). 3 quotes checked against the transcript; 2 names checked for a spoken or on-screen source; 0 of 1 visible events checked against a frame. Not human-reviewed. Observations and transcript may still be wrong.

Frame at 34:3034:30

Play from 34:22 on the Internet Archive This passage on the film's page

Evidence and details

Starts here: pause in speech. Sequence 106 · shots 315–315. Observations cite a frame (frame:n) or a time (t:m:ss); frames are the sampled ones above.

Place
(private office, interior) evidence: frame:1
People
  • man wearing light shirt, cowboy hat, and gun belt visible, audible
  • woman wearing dark vest, white blouse, and wide-brimmed hat visible, audible
Seen happening
  • The woman is seen adjusting the man’s neckwear while he speaks. [frame:1]
Also said
“You sure you're lost in the nut Dempsey? Come on.” 34:29
Seen
cowboy hat [frame:1], gun belt [frame:1], wooden door frame [frame:1], wall paneling [frame:1]
Interpretation
Model opinion, not evidence: mood: tense and intimate; themes: distrust, gender roles in Westerns, physical proximity as tension; style notes: medium close-up, high-contrast lighting, static framing

A man and a woman in Western attire stand close in a dim interior, speaking. The woman adjusts the man’s neckwear while he questions her intentions.

“Oh, I'm sorry.” 34:25 · “You're not trying to fool me too, are you?” 34:27 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 34:30 (passage 34:22–34:38); US record: No renewal found

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