Public Reel

Water Rustlers · Beat 90 · permalink

Forest

20:29–20:43 Released 1938; registered 1939

Machine annotation by Qwen/Qwen3-VL-235B-A22B-Instruct, cut beats-0.2, prompt beats-0.2. Machine checks passed. 2 quotes checked against the transcript; 1 name checked for a spoken or on-screen source; no visible events claimed. Not human-reviewed. Observations and transcript may still be wrong.

Frame at 20:3320:33Frame at 20:4020:40

Play from 20:29 on the Internet Archive This passage on the film's page

Evidence and details

Starts here: pause in speech. Sequence 51 · shots 168–169. Observations cite a frame (frame:n) or a time (t:m:ss); frames are the sampled ones above.

Place
forest (forest, exterior) evidence: frame:1
Time of day
night evidence: frame:1
People
  • man, mid-30s, medium build, wearing dark shirt and neckerchief, holding a stringed instrument visible, audible
Seen
stringed instrument (mandolin or similar), tree trunk
Interpretation
Model opinion, not evidence: mood: light-hearted, slightly ironic; themes: music, group dynamics, humor; style notes: medium close-up, high-contrast lighting, static framing, night setting

A man holds a stringed instrument outdoors at night, smiling. He speaks about singing and a plan, but no other people are visible or named.

“It's too bad none of you boys can sing. I uh...” 20:33 · “Don't spoil my good plan by trying it myself.” 20:36 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 20:33 (passage 20:29–20:43); US record: No renewal found

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