Woman on the Run (1950)

Norman Foster, Ann Sheridan, Dennis O'Keefe, Robert Keith · 1950 · 77 min

A man witnesses a murder and disappears rather than testify, and the film follows his wife as she looks for him — discovering along the way a husband she had long since stopped paying attention to. Ann Sheridan is dry, funny and completely in command of it. San Francisco is shot on location throughout, right down to a finale on a rollercoaster. Nearly lost for good: the original negative burned, and a surviving print turned up at the British Film Institute.

Chosen print (2026-08-22): Archive.org item Woman_on_the_Run — 0.67 GB MP4 · 640×480 · 76.9 min ✓.

Culled: Two 1080p-class copies — the Film Noir Foundation's 2016 restoration is the laundering trap its PD rationale already names — plus a colorized derivative.

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.

Print upgraded (2026-08-22). Replaced Woman_on_the_Run (640x480 @ 1.2 Mbps) with Archive.org item woman-on-the-run-1950_202312 — 1456x1080 @ 2.7 Mbps, 1.60 GB, 78.6 min.

Found by the 2026-08-22 catalog-wide print sweep, after the rule change that allows restoration transfers. Candidates were scored on resolution and bits per pixel, then compared frame-by-frame against the incumbent before this one was taken. Broadcast captures, AI upscales, colorized and frame-interpolated copies were rejected outright; where a candidate's frame was a different shape, cropdetect was used to tell a genuinely wider picture from a crop hiding in a wide container.

The superseded print stays in the catalog as a superseded edition and keeps seeding — its torrent has its own info_hash and its own swarm, and anyone part-way through a download of it is unaffected.

Public domain in the United States by non-renewal. Published 1950 under the 1909 Act, which required a renewal registration in the 28th year; the scanned Catalog of Copyright Entries motion-picture volumes for 1977 (first half of the window) 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 1978 half of the window lives in the Copyright Office's post-1977 online records; that search is the named remaining verification step. 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. Print caution belongs here too: the Film Noir Foundation's 2016 restoration is a commercial transfer and must never be the source.