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You should be fine. Copyright law is a big frigging headache, the laws are poorly laid out and there's too much gray area. Why is anybody accusing you of immorality? The entertainment industry is very cutthroat and the big copyright holders are in general a bunch of a rich robber barons who embody the sin of greed. Depriving them of a few dollars so they can't afford an extra swimming pool or third pony for their Veruca Salt-like daughters, oh how terrible. Little Udu Afadudu in Uganda is scavenging through a pile of garbage right now for his lunch as his emaciated body shakes from hunger and young Liu Zhi-hu in a Szechuan sweatshop isn't even allowed a bathroom break on her 12 hour shift as she slaves on your next pair of shoes and she gets a good beating or electric prodding if she falls behind schedule in even the slightest.

I have much more sympathy for the big copyright holders as far as piracy is concerned, the fact that movie studios and record companies are losing money is making them less likely to take risks and has whipped the bigwigs up into a greedy frenzy which is hurting the quality of everything and also making it harder for fledgling filmmakers like you or I to "make it". Ironically, piracy seems to slip under the radar more often whereas it seems like legit filmmakers who bend the rules using the material creatively get screwed more. Copyright laws should target criminals and be softer on artists and creative users, not the other way around. Also dealing with them really varies since some copyright holders are aforementioned robber baron bastards whereas others are more progressive and free wheeling.

If it's from a public domain film that nobody cares about and anyone can release on DVD, your chances of being caught are virtually nil, especially if you use the soundtrack from the movie itself and not a separate source like vinyl, CD, mp3, etc. That's where it gets gray because the audio track of a public domain film is legally part of it and therefore possibly considered PD as well. Also, if you play backwards or distort the music or sound effects you want to use it hides your tracks very well, I do this on occasion, it also throws off YouTube's "auto detectors". It legally takes you into a grayer area because distorting part of a song or sound effect in your own way starts to nudge it away from someone else's intellectual property and towards your own original creation. And obviously the less of it you use, the better.

In general, as long as you're not too brazen and don't go taking sh!t from the big record companies, very minor copyright infringement (that legally should be fair use anyways) is fairly easy to get through the radar. The morality argument that the David guy brought up earlier is absurd because technically almost everything you freakin' touch is copyrighted. The Coca Cola Company could sue you for putting a can of Coke in your movie, but they wouldn't. Putting movie posters on the walls of your characters' rooms is technically copyright infringement yet most filmmakers do it without paying a red cent to anybody. Just use common sense and pick your battles. You can get sued for doing anything in this crazy world we live in.

Many of those PD films used library music, mostly from DeWolfe, some of which is under copyright, some of which is not. Little of which is still used in movies anymore at all except by something like Ren and Stimpy or the occasional commercial for nostalgic purposes.