Too Late for Tears

The film 'Too Late for Tears' was released in 1949 and was originally registered for US copyright by Hunt Stromberg Productions, Inc. on August 14, 1949, under registration number LP2524. Under the Copyright Act of 1909, works from this era required a manual renewal filing with the US Copyright Office during the 28th year of their initial term to maintain protection. For this film, the renewal window opened in 1976 and closed in 1977. Extensive searches of the Stanford Copyright Renewal Database, the Catalog of Copyright Entries (CCE), and the Film Superlist (Hurst/Baer) confirm that no renewal was filed for LP2524. Because the copyright was not renewed, the film entered the public domain in the United States on January 1, 1978. Its presence in numerous public domain DVD collections (such as those from Alpha Video) and its frequent availability on the Internet Archive without takedowns further corroborate its public domain status. While a high-quality restoration was released by Flicker Alley in 2016, that copyright applies only to the new restorative elements (e.g., specific digital cleanup or new scores), not the original 1949 underlying motion picture.