Public Reel

Water Rustlers · Beat 239 · permalink

Private office

49:15–50:10 Released 1938; registered 1939

Machine annotation by Qwen/Qwen3-VL-235B-A22B-Instruct, cut beats-0.2, prompt beats-0.2. Machine checks flagged: visible event not seen. 4 quotes checked against the transcript; 3 names checked for a spoken or on-screen source; 1 of 2 visible events checked against a frame. Not human-reviewed. Observations and transcript may still be wrong.

Frame at 49:4049:40Frame at 50:0750:07

Play from 49:15 on the Internet Archive This passage on the film's page

Evidence and details

Starts here: pause in speech. Sequence 144 · shots 427–428. 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 and trousers, seated at desk, glasses visible
  • man in cowboy hat and vest, standing outdoors visible
  • man in cowboy hat, seated outdoors visible
Seen happening
  • A man sits at a desk indoors. [frame:1]
  • Two men in cowboy hats shake hands outdoors. [frame:2]
Also said
“Round up all the gang. I'm going out to mine and get Barrett's crew.” 49:32 · “You fool! You ought to be blowing the kingdoms, Tom. You don't fear it.” 49:56
Seen
desk, typewriter, wall hanging, cowboy hats, vest
Interpretation
Model opinion, not evidence: mood: tense; themes: conflict over land, law enforcement, confrontation; style notes: black-and-white, medium shots, natural lighting outdoors, studio lighting indoors, Western costume

A man in a shirt and trousers sits at a desk indoors while another man in a cowboy hat stands outside shaking hands with a seated man. The transcript mentions dynamite, a showdown, and a Martin Ranch, indicating a conflict over land use.

“Those ranches are drilling in the hills on the south side of the dam. Looks like they're fixing the dynamite.” 49:16 · “Notify the sheriff.” 49:27 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 49:40 (passage 49:15–50:10); US record: No renewal found

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