• Cropped publicity photograph for the 1937 film Captains Courageous, featuring Spencer Tracy and Freddie Bartholomew.
• Such images were taken on set during filming, or as part of an organized photo-shoot, by a studio photographer. They were then disseminated to the media and the public to promote the film (see Film still).
• This is definitely a film still rather than a screenshot, as the quality is too high (compare, for instance, with this screenshot from the film).

Public domain explanation

• It is unlikely that this image was secured with copyright protection, as stated by film induustry expert Gerald Mast in Film Study and the Copyright Law (1989) p. 87:

"According to the old copyright act, such production stills were not automatically copyrighted as part of the film and required separate copyrights as photographic stills ... Most studios have never bothered to copyright these stills because they were happy to see them pass into the public domain, to be used by as many people in as many publications as possible."

• If there is any chance that the photograph was copyrighted, under the terms of the 1909 Copyright Act (which was law until 1978) it would have had to be renewed 28 years after publication, otherwise it entered the public domain. A search for copyright renewal records of 1965 ([1], [2]) reveal no trace that this occurred.