Is The Red House (1947) public domain?
The copyright record for this film, written out in full so you can check it.
The film is public domain. The score is unchecked
What is usually said
Public domain, never renewed.
The finding, and the working behind it
The film is public domain: registered LP864 in 1947, with the registrations either side renewed and this one passed over. The Rozsa score has not been checked.
The phrase “red house” does not occur in either volume, and Thalia Productions appears nowhere in them. Sol Lesser’s other work WAS being renewed in that exact window — Tarzan and the Huntress and Tarzan and the Mermaids are both in the 1975 volume — so the producer’s library was live and this title was passed over.
The bracket is immediate: L860, L861, L862, L863, then a gap where 864 would be, then L866, L867, L868. L863 was renewed. L866 was renewed. L864 was not.
Underneath the film is George Agnew Chamberlain’s novel, published 1945. Its own term is a separate question and was not checked here.
The register, as it stands
- Original registration
- LP864, (C) Thalia Productions, Inc., 7 February 1947
- Production
- Produced by Sol Lesser, directed by Delmer Daves
- Renewal fell due
- 1974–1975
- Renewal found
- none for the film
- Score
- Miklos Rozsa — not searched
- Searched
- 2026-09-01
The score is not cleared, and must not be described as cleared
The music is by Miklos Rozsa, who separately registered and PERSONALLY renewed a great deal of his own work — his violin concerto and his clarinet sonatina both appear as personal renewals in the online catalog. A 1947 film score’s renewal fell due in 1974–75 and would sit in the printed CCE MUSIC volumes, which were not pulled for this research.
So this is an open question, not a negative finding. We have not found a renewal on the score; we have also not looked in the place it would be. Those are different things, and describing this film means answering the second one first.
How to check this yourself
Everything above is drawn from public records. None of it requires our word:
- The Catalog of Copyright Entries, the Copyright Office’s printed registration and renewal volumes, scanned and searchable at the Internet Archive and at the Online Books Page. Registration numbers beginning LP or MP are film entries.
- The Copyright Office online records at copyright.gov, which are complete from 1978 and therefore decisive for any renewal that fell due from then on.
- The NFPF Field Guide to Sponsored Films, for the industrial and educational titles, which records copyright status entry by entry.
Where these numbers came from
- Catalog of Copyright Entries, Motion Pictures 1974 and 1975, read for the renewal sequence around L864 and for Thalia Productions as claimant.
What this does and does not mean
This is a finding about United States copyright, made in good faith from the public record. Copyright terms differ by country, and a film in the public domain here may still be protected elsewhere.
A negative search proves that no record was found, which is not identical to proving that no record exists. The Copyright Office says as much about its own catalogs. Where a search could not be decisive we say so above rather than rounding it up to certainty.
This is a record of research and not legal advice. If you hold a right in this film, or you think we have read the record wrong, write to mike@tapeterritory.com with what we missed and we will correct it here.
Why we did this research
Establishing what may be published is the first step before restoring a film and writing an audio description for it. That is what this site is for, and we do the same work on commission — audio description and captioning, with published rates.