Impact (1949)

Arthur Lubin, Brian Donlevy, Ella Raines, Charles Coburn · 1949 · 111 min

A wife and her lover plan to kill her industrialist husband; the plan misfires, the lover dies instead, and the husband walks away free, presumed dead, and quietly takes work as a mechanic in small-town Idaho while she stands trial for his murder. The reversal lands early and the film is unusually smart about the aftermath. Ella Raines grounds the second half, and Charles Coburn's detective is more patient than anyone in this plot deserves.

Chosen print (2026-08-22): Archive.org item impact — 4.0 GB MPEG-2 · 640×480 · 109.6 min.

Runs 1.4 min under the catalogue listing; the eye-pass confirmed complete titles rather than a cut print.

Selected from our vetted candidate queue after the automated reject rules and a curation pass. The downloaded file was verified byte-for-byte against Archive.org's published size and MD5, and the torrent was generated from that exact file.

Watched end to end and confirmed on 2026-08-22 (owner eye-pass): runtime, intact titles, no watermarks or overlays, no colorization or crop, audio in sync.

Public domain in the United States by non-renewal. Published 1949 under the 1909 Act, which required a renewal registration in the 28th year; the scanned Catalog of Copyright Entries motion-picture volumes for 1976–77 contain no renewal of this film (checked 2026-08-17 against the Archive.org scans — method, matches and limits recorded in our verification notes). The common word matches only industrial shorts (crash-repair and bumper-system films). The check treats OCR absence as strong evidence corroborating the decades-long PD distribution consensus, not as sole proof; final sign-off re-reads the window at torrent-publish time.