This article was originally written for the 31 Days of Oscar programming in the TCM Now Playing newsletter in February 2025.
February 1 kicks off a special time of the year, TCM’s annual 31 Days of Oscar showcase! Cementing its 31st year, the next 31 days are dedicated to celebrating Academy Award-winning and nominated films throughout history, leading up to the 97th annual Academy Awards airing live on March 2. This year’s offerings begin with one Paul Muni biopic, the Best Picture winner The Life of Emile Zola (1937), and conclude early on March 4 with another, The Story of Louis Pasteur (1936), for which Muni won his only Best Actor Oscar. In between, the series spans 1928-2017 and is organized in a unique, fun way. Daytime programming features winners and nominees grouped by Oscar category (with weekends reserved for Best Picture), while the primetime/overnight hours are devoted to nominated and winning actors grouped by the types of characters they portray: Oscar-Worthy Teachers, Prisoners, Patients, Cowboys and so on.
This allows for some enjoyable and offbeat groupings. Take Oscar-Worthy Criminals on February 3: four all-time essential and beloved films are mixed with one that deserves to be far better known. First is The Sting (1973), which earned Robert Redford his only acting nomination as the small-time grifter Johnny Hooker, who teams with Paul Newman’s Henry Gondorff in Depression-era Chicago to pull off the biggest con of their lives. Both stars generate so much chemistry that even now, it’s surprising they only worked together twice. The Sting catapulted Redford to the top of the industry list of money-making stars, a ranking he held for three years.
The influential gangster classic Bonnie and Clyde (1967) stands as one of nine films in Oscar history to garner five acting nominations—for Warren Beatty, Faye Dunaway, Gene Hackman, Michael J. Pollard and Estelle Parsons, who won Best Supporting Actress for her turn as the shrewish Blanche Yarrow. While she famously—or infamously—shrieks through the film, Yarrow also provides some of its most haunting moments and is unforgettable in the role.
Barbara Stanwyck set the mold for film noir femmes fatales in Double Indemnity (1944), earning her third of four Oscar nominations. Keep an eye out for a shot that holds on her in the back seat of a car, as her face registers the unseen murder happening in the front seat—a great bit of acting and as icy a noir moment as they come. Sam Jaffe, meanwhile, received his only career nomination for The Asphalt Jungle (1950), a classic heist noir in which he plays a criminal mastermind with a mischievous glint. “One way or another, we all work for our vice,” he says, and his own vice will memorably do him in.
The final film of the bunch is the excellent Algiers (1938), which not only nabbed Charles Boyer the second of his four career acting nominations but propelled him to top stardom. While the film is unfortunately not revived much today, Algiers made both Boyer and Hedy Lamarr household names, with Boyer forever cemented as the consummate French lover of Hollywood cinema. He plays Pepe, a criminal king hiding in the native quarter of Algiers known as the Casbah. Perhaps only Boyer could convincingly woo his lover by telling her that she reminds him of the Paris subway, which prompts a delirious sequence in which he and Lamarr romantically recite the names of subway stops.
In a cheeky bit of scheduling, a night of Oscar-Worthy Prostitutes on February 13 is followed on Valentine’s Day by Oscar-Worthy Lovers. The prostitutes range from pre-Code Greta Garbo (Anna Christie, 1930) and Helen Hayes (The Sin of Madelon Claudet, 1931) to Elizabeth Taylor (BUtterfield 8, 1960) and Jane Fonda (Klute, 1971), but also included is the little-remembered Marjorie Rambeau, who earned a Best Supporting Actress nod for Primrose Path (1940).
Directed by Gregory La Cava, it’s a gem in which Rambeau supports her family—which includes her no-good alcoholic husband and their two daughters—by prostituting herself. Her mother, also a former sex worker, lives in the same shantytown shack, and all this sordid home life presents a problem for daughter Ginger Rogers as she starts a tenuous romance with Joel McCrea. Rambeau is unforgettable: a wise and world-weary mother who understands life and compassionately supports her daughter. “Somebody’s gotta take care of the family,” she tells Rogers, “And while it ain’t just like I might have asked for, I done the best I knew how.” Rambeau’s performance will tug at your heartstrings.
Among the daytime programming, February 5 is notable for honoring a category that went defunct after 1956: Best Original Story. The history of Oscar’s writing categories is convoluted. At various times since 1928, there have been awards for Original Story, Motion Picture Story, Original Motion Picture Story, Story and Screenplay, Original Screenplay, Screenplay, Adapted Screenplay and Writing. (Today, there are awards for Original Screenplay and Adapted Screenplay.) Best Original Story was meant to honor what might be considered the screenplay’s treatment: the overall action and progression of the story without the dialogue. In the studio era, the story and screenplay for a particular film were often assigned to different writers, so there was a logic to the differentiation.
Included within the seven films showcased for their nominations or wins in that category, One Way Passage (1932) stands out for a deeply romantic and wrenching story that still brings audiences to tears. It’s the tale of a doomed love affair between a dying woman and a condemned convict who meet aboard an ocean liner headed for San Francisco. The final pairing of stars William Powell and Kay Francis, the film is arguably the finest of the six they made together. Robert Lord won the Original Story Oscar, but his win was tinged with some irony. Director Tay Garnett, who had started as a writer himself, recounted that there had been several screenplay drafts prepared from Lord’s story, and none had worked because they were too purely tragic, a tough sell in the Depression Era. Garnett had the idea to inject some comedy and lightness as a counterpoint to the somber plot. Warner Bros. liked the approach and assigned him to write a new treatment and direct the film. (Writers Wilson Mizner and Joseph Jackson also contributed to the final script.) Garnett chose not to take any writing credit because, as he said, it was his first film for the studio, and he didn’t want to press his luck. Be that as it may, the story, direction, performances and overall film have stood the test of time beautifully and should not be missed.
The last writer to receive a Best Original Story Oscar was Dalton Trumbo for The Brave One (1956), a touching tale of a peasant boy in Mexico who befriends a bull destined for the bullring. Trumbo, however, didn’t receive his Oscar until 1975. He had been credited onscreen under the pseudonym Robert Rich because he was blacklisted at the time for his personal political beliefs. No one showed up to accept the Oscar at the 1957 Academy Awards, and it went unclaimed until 1975, when it was presented to Trumbo with his name rightfully engraved on its base. Trumbo died a year later. In 2000, his name was restored to the film’s credits for all future screenings and airings.
TCM is presenting two days’ worth of films in the Best Original Song category, and the first, on February 7, is devoted almost entirely to the 1930s and 1940s, a golden age for American standards. The embarrassment of riches in that era’s songwriting is well illustrated by the fact that Cole Porter’s “I’ve Got You Under My Skin,” in Born to Dance(1936), was nominated but didn’t win the award. This sounds astonishing until one realizes that the winner that year was Jerome Kern for “The Way You Look Tonight,” another now-iconic standard, in Swing Time (1936), which can be seen on February 14.
The art of film editing has often been best demonstrated by action movies, and some prime examples are in store on February 19. Bullitt (1968) is prized for arguably the most thrilling, gravity-defying car chase ever put to film, and editor Frank P. Keller likely won the Academy Award for that sequence alone. The Great Escape (1963) and The Dirty Dozen(1967), meanwhile, are exhilarating World War II dramas—the former about an attempted escape from a POW camp, and the latter about a motley group of convicts assigned to what is likely to be a suicide commando mission. Both films are lengthy (172 and 150 minutes, respectively), but they both contain razor-sharp, fluid editing that makes those running times feel much briefer.
One of The Great Escape’s signature moments comes when Steve McQueen’s character steals a motorcycle and jumps it over a six-foot-high barbed wire fence. To achieve the jump, which was performed by stunt double Bud Ekins, a depression was dug into the ground to allow for a natural ramp-like incline. McQueen rides from a close-up into a long shot toward the fence, and a perfectly timed cut then picks up Ekins riding the bike up and over. As critic Sheila O’Malley has written, “Editor Ferris Webster deserved his Oscar nomination for that cut alone. The illusion that it is the actor himself is total.”
The Dirty Dozen was edited by Michael Luciano, who had started in poverty row films of the 1930s and worked his way up in the industry to become the most frequent editor for director Robert Aldrich. Luciano’s four Oscar nominations were all for Aldrich films, including The Dirty Dozen, whose long, climactic commando raid sequence remains a model of action movie editing: fluid, lean and completely cinematic in how the cutting is used to tell the story.
All in all, from silent movies to six relatively recent titles making their TCM premieres—Working Girl (1988), Henry V (1989), The Madness of King George (1994), The Fighter(2010), Amour (2012) and Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri (2017)—these 31 days and nights truly offer something for everyone.
