- “31 Days of Oscar” on TCM – Day 2: On Feb. 14, Turner Classic Movies will present 12 Oscar-winning or -nominated titles with a – at least partial – Paris, France, setting, among them Roberta, Camille, Ninotchka, Casablanca, Gigi, Charade, and the TCM premiere of Amélie.
‘31 Days of Oscar’ on TCM – Day 2: 12 features (at least partly) set in Paris, France, including Roberta, Camille, Gigi, and Amélie
Turner Classic Movies’ 2026 edition of “31 Days of Oscar” continues on Saturday, Feb. 14 – St. Valentine’s Day – with the airing of 12 Oscar-winning or -nominated features at least partly set in Paris, France, including the TCM premiere of Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s international blockbuster Amélie. (See TCM’s “31 Days of Oscar 2026 – Day 2” schedule further below. Most titles will remain available for a while on the Watch TCM app.)
Below is a brief overview of each “31 Days of Oscar 2026 – Day 2” feature, listed in chronological order. Oddly, most of them have one-word titles (five of which women’s names); appropriately, two of them star (now 94-year-old) Paris-born Leslie Caron.
Roberta (1935)
Although best remembered as one of Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers’ 10 pairings, William A. Seiter’s romantic musical comedy-drama Roberta actually belongs to top-billed Irene Dunne in the role of the new de facto head of the titular Parisian fashion store, and to Dunne’s future island-mate Randolph Scott* (on loan from Paramount) as her love interest, a former American football player who unexpectedly (and however incongruously) inherits the place after his Aunt Minnie, a.k.a. Madame Roberta (Helen Westley), dies without leaving a will.
Unfortunately, unlike Mark Sandrich’s Astaire–Rogers musicals The Gay Divorcee and Follow the Fleet, and George Stevens’ Swing Time, Roberta has the feel of a B movie with Grade A production values. Even so, the movie does feature several memorable sequences, including Astaire and Rogers’ first-class “Lovely to Look At” dance number and Dunne introducing on the big screen “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes.” (Her soprano version is just fine, but The Platters’ groovy 1959 rendition is the definitive one.)
Written by Jane Murfin, Sam Mintz, and Allan Scott, with additional dialogue by actor Glenn Tryon, Roberta is based on Jerome Kern and Otto Harbach’s 1933 Broadway musical of the same name, itself an adaptation of Alice Duer Miller’s novel Gowns by Roberta, published that same year.
Renamed Lovely to Look At, MGM’s upscale 1952 remake stars Kathryn Grayson, Howard Keel, Red Skelton, Ann Miller, and, as the Astaire and Rogers of the early 1950s, Gower Champion and Marge Champion. Veteran Mervyn LeRoy (Gold Diggers of 1933) handled the proceedings with a tired hand.
Note: As a platinum blonde, Lucille Ball can be spotted in Roberta’s “climactic” fashion show.
* See Garson Kanin’s 1940 comedy My Favorite Wife, also featuring Randolph Scott’s longtime roommate Cary Grant (take these “gay lovers” stories with a boulder-sized grain of salt) and Gail Patrick.
Camille (1937)
George Cukor’s Camille boasts what many consider Greta Garbo’s finest performance.
Whether or not you agree with that assessment – you may prefer instead Queen Christina, Anna Karenina, or Ninotchka – Garbo is profoundly moving as the Swedish-accented French courtesan who falls passionately in love with a wealthy, handsome younger man (Robert Taylor), only to eventually succumb to tuberculosis.
This is the movies’ real Love Story. Camille, in fact, is one of those relatively uncommon Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer productions of the studio era that are as engrossing as they are elaborate.
Although Garbo lost the Best Actress Oscar to Luise Rainer for The Good Earth, she was (again) the choice of the New York Film Critics Circle. (Her first NYFCC win was for Anna Karenina at the group’s inaugural awards in 1935; curiously, she was bypassed at that year’s Academy Awards even though there were six Best Actress nominees.*)
* For the record, the 1935 Best Actress Academy Award contenders were the following (six nominees due to ties in the nomination process):
- Elisabeth Bergner** – Escape Me Never
- Claudette Colbert – Private Worlds
- Katharine Hepburn – Alice Adams
- Miriam Hopkins – Becky Sharp
- Merle Oberon – The Dark Angel
- Eventual winner Bette Davis – Dangerous
Note: We’re unaware of Escape Me Never (Bergner’s version†) and Private Worlds having ever been aired on TCM.
** Elisabeth Bergner made Oscar history as the first Best Actress nominee in a non-Hollywood – in this case, British – production. Coincidentally, 1935 winner Bette Davis would star in a remake of another British-made Bergner hit of the 1930s, Stolen Life. (Bergner’s version came out in 1939; Davis’, with the slightly modified title A Stolen Life, was released in 1946.)
† Warner Bros.’ 1947 remake starring Ida Lupino in the old Elisabeth Bergner role has been frequently aired. It was completely bypassed at the Academy Awards.
The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1939)
William Dieterle’s The Hunchback of Notre Dame is a grandiose, solemn, and a bit overlong spectacle featuring a fantastic performance by an all but unrecognizable Charles Laughton* as the titular character, Quasimodo, the grotesquely deformed antihero in Victor Hugo’s 1831 novel.
Laughton, in fact, is far superior to Lon Chaney in the 1923 film version and is just as moving as John Hurt in David Lynch’s The Elephant Man. His performance is so pitch-perfect that it was apparently deemed too good for the Academy Awards – in a year that had Mickey Rooney nominated for Babes in Arms and Robert Donat (at times a first-rate actor) winning for some sappy histrionics in Goodbye, Mr. Chips.
In her first Hollywood role, 19-year-old Maureen O’Hara is a ravishingly beautiful Esmeralda, while Cedric Hardwicke, as the villainous Archdeacon of the Notre Dame cathedral, should have been shortlisted in the Oscars’ Best Supporting Actor category.
* Charles Laughton had won the Best Actor Academy Award for Alexander Korda’s British-made comedy-drama The Private Life of Henry VIII (for the period 1932–1933), thus making Oscar history as the first actor to take home the golden statuette for a performance in a movie made away from Hollywood.
Ninotchka (1939)
One of the most sparkling comedies of the studio era, Ernst Lubitsch’s Best Picture nominee Ninotchka deservedly earned Greta Garbo her third (and final) Best Actress nod for her portrayal of a humorless Soviet envoy who, with the assistance of suave Parisian denizen Melvyn Douglas, discovers the beauty and magic of capitalism – and it is beautiful and magical as long as you’re filthy rich and, preferably, have no need to pay taxes on your income, assets, or capital gains.
Ninotchka’s screenplay was credited to Charles Brackett, Billy Wilder, and Walter Reisch, from a screen story by Melchior Lengyel. All four received Oscar nominations in the Best Screenplay and Best Story categories.
Note: Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer’s ads for Ninotchka heralded “Garbo Laughs!” as if that was a big-screen first. Bear in mind that Greta Garbo had laughed uproariously in Rouben Mamoulian’s 1933 historicalish drama Queen Christina.
Casablanca (1942)
In the eyes of some the greatest romantic big-screen drama ever made, Michael Curtiz’s Casablanca stars Humphrey Bogart as an American immigrant living in the titular Moroccan city, Ingrid Bergman as his Norwegian former paramour, and Paul Henreid as a Czechoslovakian Resistance leader.
But leave it to supporting players Claude Rains (who received an Oscar nod), Peter Lorre, Sydney Greestreet, and Conrad Veidt to truly liven things up.
Note: Casablanca opened in New York City in November 1942, but since it was released in the Los Angeles area in 1943, its eight Oscar nominations and eventual three wins† would be announced only in early 1944.
† Casablanca won Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Screenplay (Julius J. Epstein, Philip G. Epstein and Howard Koch; based on Murray Burnett and Joan Alison’s unproduced 1940 play Everybody Comes to Rick’s).
An American in Paris (1951)
Elia Kazan’s A Streetcar Named Desire and George Stevens’ A Place in the Sun apparently “split the (heavy drama) vote”* at the 1952 Oscars (for the year 1951), which paved the way for Vincente Minnelli’s handsomely mounted but hollow bonbon An American in Paris, a great showcase for Gene Kelly’s feet and teeth, to win Best Picture.
The two women in Kelly’s life are Leslie Caron (see Gigi further below) and Nina Foch, who, decades later, would complain that her big dramatic scene was excised from the movie, thus ruining her chances of a Best Supporting Actress Oscar nomination. (Foch would be shortlisted in that category for Executive Suite, 1954.)
Note: George Stevens was named 1951’s Best Director, but would you believe that An American in Paris actually won a writing Oscar? Seriously: Best Story and Screenplay for Alan Jay Lerner, who seven years later would receive the Best Adapted Screenplay Oscar for Gigi.
* This is the usual lazy explanation for Occam’s razor types. As for the other two Best Picture contenders that, one assumes, didn’t “split” any votes, they were: Mervyn LeRoy’s Quo Vadis (the only epic in the running) and Anatole Litvak’s Decision Before Dawn (the only title in the running with two capital Ds).
Gigi (1958)
A veritable feast for the eye, Vincente Minnelli’s Best Picture winner Gigi is also an actors’ feast: After Lili (aired on Feb. 13 on TCM) and Gaby (but before Fanny), Leslie Caron is the titular tomboyish would-be courtesan (singing voice by Betty Wand), ably assisted by great-aunt and courtesan trainer Isabel Jeans, open-minded grandma Hermione Gingold, and even Louis Jourdan as her bon vivant romantic interest and veteran master ham and Academy Award nominee Maurice Chevalier (for both The Love Parade and The Big Pond, 1929–1930) at his most unaffectedly debonair.
Gigi’s final sequence – Chevalier warbling “Thank Heaven for Little Girls” – is sheer movie magic. And If you think there’s something “dirty” about this Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe song, that’s nothing a good brain transplant couldn’t resolve.
Prior to Leslie Caron, Gigi was played by Danièle Delorme in Jacqueline Audry’s French-made 1949 non-musical and by Audrey Hepburn on the Broadway stage. (The musical version would be brought to Broadway in 1973, with Karin Wolfe in the title role. More recently, Vanessa Hudgens starred in a 2015 revival.)
Adapted by Alan Jay Lerner, Gigi is based on Colette’s 1944 novella.
Of note, Gigi was nominated for – and won – nine Oscars. But despite its first-rate cast, not one performer was shortlisted. Maurice Chevalier was handed the Academy’s Honorary Award at the 1958 ceremony (for movies released in 1957).
Charade (1963)
Audrey Hepburn turns on her so-called “elfin” charm in Stanley Donen’s amusing and hugely successful romantic mystery comedy Charade, and in spite of the glaring age difference, she (as the sexual predator*) and costar Cary Grant (as her prey) are a great match.
Another plus: Henry Mancini’s music, and Mancini and lyricist Johnny Mercer’s Oscar-nominated title song, heard at one point while the two leads are on a boat slowly sailing down the Seine.
Also in the Charade cast: Future Best Supporting Actor Oscar winners James Coburn (Affliction, 1998), George Kennedy (Cool Hand Luke, 1967), and Walter Matthau (The Fortune Cookie, 1966).
Screenplay by Peter Stone, from Stone and Marc Behm’s screen story. In brief: The duo had written an unsold script – “The Unsuspecting Wife” – that Stone proceeded to turn into novel whose serialization caught the attention of interested parties in Hollywood, with Stanley Donen ultimately snapping up the rights.
* In p.c. 21st-century parlance.
Irma la Douce (1963)
Another of Billy Wilder’s attempts to emulate Ernst Lubitsch, Irma la Douce – unlike the more problematic (and also Paris-set) Love in the Afternoon – is moderately successful, though suspension of disbelief if essential for one to accept Jack Lemmon and Best Actress Oscar nominee Shirley MacLaine as French nationals. Narration by Gigi’s Louis Jourdan – a bona fide Frenchman.
Artistically speaking, Wilder had better luck with his post-WWII Berlin-set romantic comedy A Foreign Affair (1948), starring Jean Arthur and Marlene Dietrich in excellent form, along with John Lund.
A Foreign Affair landed two Academy Award nominations: Best Adapted Screenplay (Billy Wilder, Charles Brackett, and Richard L. Breen) and Best Black-and-White Cinematography (Charles B. Lang).
Amélie (2001)
Starring Audrey Tautou as the titular Parisian waitress and featuring Mathieu Kassovitz as her romantic interest, Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s Amélie / Le Fabuleux destin d’Amélie Poulain – which may remind some of Jean-Jacques Beineix’s equally freewheeling 1981 hit Diva – became the cool international blockbuster of the year.
Amélie ultimately garnered four César Awards (Best Film, Best Diretor, Best Music, Best Production Design) and five Academy Award nominations (including Best Foreign Language Film and Best Original Screenplay for Jeunet and Guillaume Laurant).*
So, is Amélie that good?
Not really, but Audrey Tautou is a personably oddballish heroine who largely manages to keep one’s interest throughout. She might have been wholly successful had Amélie been less focused on hip and more on wit.
Note: Not an Oscar movie, but it would be just groovy if TCM were to showcase another Amélie – the one played by Danielle Darrieux in Claude Autant-Lara’s 1948 farce Occupe-toi d’Amélie (a.k.a. Keep an Eye on Amelia), costarring Jean Desailly and Grégoire Aslan.
* Considering that without her there’s no Amélie, it’s weird that Audrey Tautou was bypassed at the Academy Awards. To this date, Tautou – a three-time Best Actress César nominee and two-time British Academy Award nominee, and one of the finest French actresses of the early 21st century – remains Oscar nomination-less.
Moulin Rouge! (2001)
Along with Alejandro Amenábar’s The Others and Stephen Daldry’s The Hours, Baz Luhrmann’s Moulin Rouge! helped to launch Nicole Kidman’s new and improved movie star career – no longer attached to that of her by then former husband Tom Cruise.
A typical Luhrmann effort, Moulin Rouge! offers far more glitter and glitz than plot and character. Fans of the filmmaker’s oeuvre may appreciate its proud excessiveness; others will likely be put off by it.
Either way, Luhrmann’s most enjoyable effort easily remains his (relatively speaking) modest directorial feature debut, the Australian-made Strictly Ballroom, starring Paul Mercurio and Tara Morice (who has a small role in Moulin Rouge!).
Moulin Rouge! went on to receive eight Oscar nominations, including Best Picture and Best Actress (Nicole Kidman). It topped two categories: Best Art Direction (art direction: Catherine Martin; set decoration: Brigitte Broch) and Best Costume Design (Catherine Martin and Angus Strathie).
Note: Baz Luhrmann’s Moulin Rouge! is no way related to John Huston’s 1952 exclamation-pointless Best Picture nominee Moulin Rouge, starring José Ferrer as Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec.
Midnight in Paris (2011)
Woody Allen’s most enthusiastically embraced effort since Bullets Over Broadway (1994), the romantic comedy fantasy Midnight in Paris stars Owen Wilson as a vacationing American screenwriter and aspiring novelist who, while at odds with materialistic fiancée Rachel McAdams, travels back in time to 1920s Paris every time the clock strikes midnight.
Also in the Midnight in Paris cast: Oscar winners Marion Cotillard (La Vie en Rose, 2007) as a fictional Pablo Picasso lover, Kathy Bates (Misery, 1990) as Gertrude Stein, and Adrien Brody (The Pianist, 2002) as Salvador Dali (no Spanish actors were available?), in addition to Tom Hiddleston, Michael Sheen, Alison Pill, Corey Stoll, and Carla Bruni, the wife of right-wing (then-)president turned convicted criminal Nicolas Sarkozy.
Midnight in Paris earned Woody Allen his third Best Original Screenplay Academy Award.* It was also shortlisted for Best Picture (producers: Letty Aronson and Stephen Tenenbaum), Best Director, and Best Art Direction (production design: Anne Seibel; set decoration: Hélène Dubreuil).
Note: A most Parisian of features, Midnight in Paris is actually a Spain-U.S. co-production.
* Woody Allen holds the record for the most Best Original Screenplay Oscar wins – his other two were for Annie Hall (1977; shared with Marshall Brickman) and Hannah and Her Sisters (1986) – and for the most nominations: 16 in all (from Interiors, 1978, to Match Point, 2005). At age 76 at the time he won for Midnight in Paris, Allen remains the oldest recipient in that category.
Immediately below is TCM’s “31 Days of Oscar – Day 2” movie schedule.
‘31 Days of Oscar – Day 2′: TCM schedule (EST) – Feb. 14
6:00 AM Roberta (1935)
Director: William A. Seiter.
Cast: Irene Dunne, Fred Astaire, Ginger Rogers, Randolph Scott, Helen Westley, Claire Dodd, Victor Varconi, Luis Alberni, Torben Meyer, Lucille Ball.
85m8:00 AM The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1939)
Director: William Dieterle.
Cast: Charles Laughton, Maureen O’Hara, Edmond O’Brien, Cedric Hardwicke, Thomas Mitchell, Alan Marshal, Walter Hampden, Harry Davenport, Katharine Alexander, George Zucco, Fritz Leiber, Etienne Girardot, Minna Gombell, Arthur Hohl, Curt Bois, George Tobias, Rod La Rocque.
117m10:00 AM Ninotchka (1939)
Director: Ernst Lubitsch.
Cast: Greta Garbo, Melvyn Douglas, Ina Claire, Bela Lugosi, Sig Ruman, Felix Bressart, Alexander Granach.12:00 PM Casablanca (1942)
Director: Michael Curtiz.
Cast: Humphrey Bogart, Ingrid Bergman, Paul Henreid, Claude Rains, Sydney Greenstreet, Peter Lorre, Conrad Veidt, S.Z. Sakall, Helmut Dantine, Curt Bois, Leonid Kinskey, Madeleine Lebeau, Joy Page, John Qualen, Dooley Wilson, Marcel Dalio.
102m1:45 PM For Scent-imental Reasons (1949)
Director: Chuck Jones.
Cast: Mel Blanc
7m2:00 PM Midnight in Paris (2011)
Director: Woody Allen.
Cast: Owen Wilson, Rachel McAdams, Marion Cotillard, Tom Hiddleston, Alison Pill, Corey Stoll, Adrien Brody, Kathy Bates, Michael Sheen, Nina Arianda, Carla Bruni, Kurt Fuller, Mimi Kennedy, Léa Seydoux.
94m3:45 PM Gigi (1958)
Director: Vincente Minnelli.
Cast: Leslie Caron, Maurice Chevalier, Louis Jourdan, Isabel Jeans, Hermione Gingold, Jacques Bergerac, Eva Gabor, John Abbott, Marie-Hélène Arnaud.
116m6:00 PM Charade (1963)
Director: Stanley Donen.
Cast: Cary Grant, Audrey Hepburn, Walter Matthau, James Coburn, George Kennedy, Dominique Minot, Ned Glass, Jacques Marin, Paul Bonifas.
114m8:00 PM An American in Paris (1951)
Director: Vincente Minnelli.
Cast: Gene Kelly, Leslie Caron, Oscar Levant, Georges Guétary, Nina Foch, Eugene Borden, Hayden Rorke, Madge Blake.
113m10:00 PM Moulin Rouge! (2001)
Director: Baz Luhrmann.
Cast: Nicole Kidman, Ewan McGregor, John Leguizamo, Jim Broadbent, Richard Roxburgh, John Leguizamo, Jacek Koman, Caroline O’Connor, Kerry Walker, Lara Mulcahy, Garry McDonald, Kylie Minogue, Tara Morice, Kip Gamblin.
Voice Cast: Ozzy Osbourne, Plácido Domingo.
128m12:15 AM Amélie (2001)
Director: Jean-Pierre Jeunet.
Cast: Audrey Tautou, Mathieu Kassovitz, Rufus, Lorella Cravotta, Serge Merlin, Jamel Debbouze, Clotilde Mollet, Claire Maurier, Dominique Pinon, Yolande Moreau.
122m2:30 AM Irma la Douce (1963)
Director: Billy Wilder.
Cast: Jack Lemmon, Shirley MacLaine, Lou Jacobi, Bruce Yarnell, Herschel Bernardi, Hope Holiday, Joan Shawlee, Grace Lee Whitney, Paul Dubov, James Brown, Bill Bixby, Tura Satana, John Alvin, James Caan.
Narrator: Louis Jourdan.
142m5:00 AM Camille (1937)
Director: George Cukor.
Cast: Greta Garbo, Robert Taylor, Lionel Barrymore, Elizabeth Allan, Jessie Ralph, Henry Daniell, Lenore Ulric, Laura Hope Crews, Rex O’Malley, Joan Leslie.
109m
“Paris, France, Oscar Movies on TCM: Roberta, Amélie” notes
“31 Days of Oscar on TCM: Paris, France” schedule via the TCM website.
Audrey Tautou Amélie image: UGC Fox Distribution.
Nina Foch discussed her “big scene” in An American in Paris at a Los Angeles County Museum of Art screening in the 1990s.
“Paris, France, Oscar Movies on TCM: Roberta, Amélie” last modified in February 2026.