- TCM schedule – Feb. 25: The series “31 Days of Oscar” continues with six Best Adapted Screenplay Academy Award contenders and six titles featuring Oscar-nominated/-winning entertainers, including The Broadway Melody, Yankee Doodle Dandy, and Cabaret.
TCM schedule – ‘31 Days of Oscar’ Day 25: 6 Best Adapted Screenplay contenders, 6 titles featuring nominated entertainers
Turner Classic Movies’ 2025 edition of “31 Days of Oscar” continues on Tuesday, Feb. 25, with the airing of six Best Adapted Screenplay contenders/winners, in addition to six titles featuring Oscar-nominated/-winning entertainers: Actors, dancers, singers, comedians. (See further below the TCM schedule on Feb. 25. Most titles will remain available for a while on the Watch TCM app.)
Below are brief comments about each TCM presentation.
Little Caesar (1931)
Not as good as Archie Mayo’s The Doorway to Hell but superior to William A. Wellman’s The Public Enemy and Howard Hawks’ Scarface, Mervyn LeRoy’s Little Caesar is notable as one of the seminal gangster dramas of the 1930s and the movie that turned Edward G. Robinson into a star. Also notable in this pre-Production Code release: The (gay) daddy-son angle between Robinson and protégé Douglas Fairbanks Jr.
Based on William R. Burnett’s 1929 novel (author’s pen name: Lincoln MacVeagh), the Al Capone-inspired Little Caesar earned Francis Edward Faragoh and Robert N. Lee an Academy Award nomination in the Best Adapted Screenplay category.
Great Expectations (1946)
Based on Charles Dickens’ 1860–1861 novel, David Lean’s Great Expectations is considered by some one of the best – perhaps the best – big-screen Dickens adaptation.
Whether or not you agree – leads John Mills, Valerie Hobson, and Alec Guinness do leave something to be desired – you’ll likely have no qualms in regard to Guy Green’s Oscar-winning* black-and-white cinematography and Finlay Currie’s performance as Abel Magwitch.
Oscar-nominated screenplay adaptation by David Lean, Anthony Havelock-Allan, and future The Poseidon Adventure director Ronald Neame.
* Great Expectations, which reached the Los Angeles area in 1947, and another British-made production released that same year, Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s Black Narcissus, became the first non-American productions to win an Oscar in the Best Cinematography category (Black-and-White/Color subcategories).
Baby Doll (1956)
Director Elia Kazan and screenwriter Tennessee Williams’ Baby Doll – based on a couple of Williams’ one-act plays* – may not be a great movie but it sure is an unusual one. Two examples: Best Actress Academy Award nominee Carroll Baker, as the 19-year-old title character, licking an ice-cream cone; Best Supporting Actress nominee Mildred Dunnock, as Baby Doll’s bird-like senile Aunt Rose Comfort, in every one of her scenes.
At age 93 one of the earliest surviving Best Actress contenders†, Carroll Baker should have taken home the 1956 Oscar statuette that, however understandably from a “sentimental” viewpoint, went to former Hollywood pariah Ingrid Bergman for Anastasia.
As for Karl Malden and Eli Wallach, their roles should have gone instead to, respectively, Melvyn Douglas/William Gargan and Steve Cochran/Aldo Ray. (There were other equally more appropriate options.) Had that happened, Baby Doll would have been a far more enjoyable movie.
* 27 Wagons Full of Cotton and The Long Stay Cut Short, or The Unsatisfactory Supper, both from 1946.
† Leslie Caron, also 93, was nominated for Lili (1953). See further below.
Judgment at Nuremberg (1961)
Possibly Stanley Kramer’s finest film, Judgment at Nuremberg offers a gripping – if fictionalized – depiction of the Nuremberg Trials. The all-star cast is mostly in fine form, especially Oscar-nominated star Spencer Tracy (who lost out to fellow player Maximilian Schell) and, in brief but memorable cameos, supporting nominees Montgomery Clift and Judy Garland.
Best Adapted Screenplay Oscar winner Abby Mann transferred his own Playhouse 90 teleplay to the big screen.
Elmer Gantry (1960)
Best Actor Oscar winner Burt Lancaster (as usual) goes way over the top as a snake-oil salesman – the snake-oil here is Christianity – in screenwriter-director Richard Brooks’ Elmer Gantry, based on parts from Sinclair Lewis’ 1927 novel.
More subtle performances are delivered by Best Supporting Actress winner Shirley Jones (see the dainty Oklahoma! and Carousel leading lady as a prostitute!) and Jean Simmons as an evangelist based on Pentecostal word-of-God-spreader Aimee Semple McPherson. (Barbara Stanwyck plays a far less trustworthy – but just as interesting – version of McPherson in Frank Capra’s The Miracle Woman.)
Note: Jean Simmons was bypassed at the Oscars despite – or perhaps because of* – the fact (well, in our view) that she reached her career peak in 1960. Her other remarkable portrayal: Spartacus’ wife Varinia in Stanley Kubrick’s Spartacus.
* In the preferential voting system, only one vote per ballot is counted; that’s how Oscar nominees (but, for the most part, not winners) are selected. That being the case, votes are inevitably split between two (or more) performances by the same actor/actress in the same year. (See the case of nominationless Sidney Poitier in 1967, when he was seen in Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, In the Heat of the Night, and To Sir, with Love.)
Thus, Jean Simmons failed to get enough votes for a nomination for either Elmer Gantry or Spartacus. But you can bet that she was Best Actress nominee no. 6 for one of these titles.
Lolita (1962)
Think about it: Stanley Kubrick’s Lolita – and Vladimir Nabokov’s 1955 novel – would be even more scandalous were they to be made/written in the first few decades of the 21st century.
James Mason stars as New England French literature professor Humbert Humbert, infatuated with young teenager Dolores Haze (12-year-old in the novel), nicknamed Lolita and played by 14/15-year-old Sue Lyon.
Peter Sellers, who should have been shortlisted for the Best Supporting Actor Oscar, is weirdly amusing as the snotty avant-garde playwright Clare Quilty and, in disguise, as busybody high-school psychologist Dr. Zempf.
Vladmir Nabokov received an Oscar nomination for his adapted screenplay.
Yankee Doodle Dandy (1942)
Michael Curtiz’s blockbuster and Best Picture Oscar nominee Yankee Doodle Dandy is a flag-waving showcase for star and eventual Best Actor winner James Cagney, who plays Broadway multitasker (and strikebreaker*) George M. Cohan as if he were a tap-dancing Tom Powers (see The Public Enemy): Abrasive, obnoxious, pathological.
That’s why we suggest you focus instead on pretty Joan Leslie as Cohan’s wife Mary Cohan (actually an amalgam of Cohan’s two wives, Ethel and Agnes).
And so you can do a bit of freaking out while watching Yankee Doodle Dandy, keep in mind that Cohan/Cagney’s mother in the movie, Rosemary DeCamp, was 11 years younger than her son.
George M. Cohan died at age 64 in November 1942, about four months after Yankee Doodle Dandy was released.
* During the Actors’ Equity Association’s historic 1919 strike, performer and producer George M. Cohan did his utmost to keep his own show, The Royal Vagabond, going.
Cabaret (1972)
One of cinema’s greatest musicals, Best Director Oscar winner Bob Fosse’s Cabaret doesn’t suffer from the sometime filmmaker’s penchant for overblown narratives and musical numbers – e.g., Sweet Charity, Lenny, All That Jazz, Star 80.
Best Actress winner Liza Minnelli delivers the performance of her life as American cabaret singer Sally Bowles, who becomes involved with a bisexual English author (played by Michael York) in Nazifying 1930s Berlin.
Oscar nominee Jay Presson Allen adapted Cabaret from Joe Masteroff’s 1966 musical (starring Jill Haworth), itself based on John Van Druten’s 1951 play I Am a Camera (filmed in 1955 with Julie Harris), in turn based on Christopher Isherwood’s semi-autobiographical 1939 novel Goodbye to Berlin.
Cabaret won a total of eight Oscars, more than any other film that year. Of its 10 nominations, it lost only – to Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather – in the Best Picture and Best Adapted Screenplay categories.
Note: The 21st-century Nazis and fascists have been – to some extent – successful in places like the United States and Argentina but, ironically, not so much in Germany (especially the former West Germany), even though the economy has been in disarray for several years, and despite what CNN and other such garbage outlets would like you to believe.
Lili (1953)
Charles Walters’ Lili should have been a gooey disaster: French-accented ugly duckling finds love while singing with carnival puppets. And yet Lili turned out to be a deeply moving, beautifully acted romantic drama.
Oscar-nominated director Walters, Best Actress nominee Leslie Caron – who should have won that year – and leading man Mel Ferrer are chiefly responsible for its tugging-at-the-heartstrings effectiveness.
The Broadway Melody (1929)
Despite its reputation as a creaky, cliché-ridden early talkie, Harry Beaumont’s Outstanding Picture Academy Award winner The Broadway Melody has zip, pep, and zing. And an unexpected feel-bittersweet ending.
The initial musical sequence, which floods the screen with a cacophony of rhythms culminating in Charles King singing, shaking, and rattling to “The Broadway Melody,” is a masterpiece.
Just as effective: Bessie Love’s climactic phone sequence*, which undoubtedly is the reason she became a finalist for the 1928–1929 Best Actress Academy Award. (No official nominations were announced that year. Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences co-founder Mary Pickford was the eventual winner for Coquette.)
* The Broadway Melody’s phone sequence is so good Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer attempted to recreate it – again using Bessie Love, but with far less success – in Charles Reisner’s 1930 musical Chasing Rainbows. What was fresh and real in 1929 felt stale and fake the following year.
The Great Ziegfeld (1936)
Robert Z. Leonard’s Best Picture Academy Award winner The Great Ziegfeld features another great telephone scene: Best Actress winner Luise Rainer, as Broadway star Ann Held, wishing impresario and former lover Florenz Ziegfeld happiness – he is about to marry actress Billie Burke – while her own heart is imploding.
The Great Ziegfeld’s other highlight: Seymour Felix’s Oscar-winning number* “A Pretty Girl Is Like a Melody,” featuring future Warner Bros. star Dennis Morgan singing (with Allan Jones’ voice) Irving Berlin’s 1919 hit, next to an elaborately costumed cast of seemingly thousands, including Virginia Bruce as the cherry on a giant wedding cake.
If only the rest of The Great Ziegfeld, starring William Powell as “Flo” and Myrna Loy as a Fantasyland version of Billie Burke, had nearly as impressive.
* In the short-lived Best Dance Direction category.
The Sunshine Boys (1975)
Herbert Ross’ The Sunshine Boys is for fans of Best Actor Oscar nominee Walter Matthau and/or Best Supporting Actor winner George Burns (in a role intended for Jack Benny). Nominee Neil Simon adapted his own 1972 play* about two grumpy old vaudevillians reunited for a revival of their once-popular act.
Although it’s understandable that Academy voters selected Burns† – then 80 years old and in the business for nearly six decades – the Best Supporting Actor Oscar that year belonged to Brad Dourif for One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.
* The play starred Best Supporting Actor Oscar winner Jack Albertson (The Subject Was Roses, 1968) and Sam Levene.
† That turned out to be his one and only Oscar nod.
Immediately below is TCM’s “31 Days of Oscar” movie schedule on Feb. 25.
‘31 Days of Oscar’: TCM schedule (EST) – Feb. 25
6:00 AM Little Caesar (1931)
Director: Mervyn LeRoy.
Cast: Edward G. Robinson, Douglas Fairbanks Jr., Glenda Farrell, Sidney Blackmer, William Collier Jr., Ralph Ince, Thomas E. Jackson, Stanley Fields, Maurice Black, George E. Stone, Landers Stevens.
80m7:30 AM Great Expectations (1946)
Director: David Lean.
Cast: John Mills, Valerie Hobson, Alec Guinness, Finlay Currie, Martita Hunt, Anthony Wager, Jean Simmons, Bernard Miles, Francis L. Sullivan, Freda Jackson, Torin Thatcher.
118m9:30 AM Baby Doll (1956)
Director: Elia Kazan.
Cast: Karl Malden, Carroll Baker, Eli Wallach, Mildred Dunnock, Lonny Chapman, Madeleine Sherwood, Rip Torn.
114m11:30 AM Judgment at Nuremberg (1961)
Director: Stanley Kramer.
Cast: Spencer Tracy, Burt Lancaster, Richard Widmark, Maximilian Schell, Marlene Dietrich, Montgomery Clift, Judy Garland, William Shatner, Werner Kemplerer, Karl Swenson, Virginia Christine, Kenneth MacKenna, Alan Baxter.
190m2:45 PM Elmer Gantry (1960)
Director: Richard Brooks.
Cast: Burt Lancaster, Jean Simmons, Arthur Kennedy, Dean Jagger, Shirley Jones, Patti Page, Edward Andrews, John McIntire, Hugh Marlowe, Philip Ober, Barry Kelley, Rex Ingram, Ed Nelson.
146m5:15 PM Lolita (1962)
Director: Stanley Kubrick.
Cast: James Mason, Sue Lyon, Shelley Winters, Peter Sellers, Gary Cockrell, Lois Maxwell, Marianne Stone.
153m8:00 PM Yankee Doodle Dandy (1942)
Director: Michael Curtiz.
Cast: James Cagney, Joan Leslie, Walter Huston, Rosemary DeCamp, Richard Whorf, Irene Manning, George Tobias, Jeanne Cagney, Frances Langford, S.Z. Sakall, Walter Catlett.
126m10:15 PM Cabaret (1972)
Director: Bob Fosse.
Cast: Liza Minnelli, Michael York, Helmut Griem, Joel Grey, Marisa Berenson, Fritz Wepper, Elisabeth Neumann-Viertel, Oliver Collignon.
124m12:30 AM Lili (1953)
Director: Charles Walters.
Cast: Leslie Caron, Mel Ferrer, Jean-Pierre Aumont, Zsa Zsa Gabor, Kurt Kasznar, Amanda Blake, Alex Gerry, Ralph Dumke, Wilton Graff.
81m2:00 AM The Broadway Melody (1929)
Director: Harry Beaumont.
Cast: Anita Page, Bessie Love, Charles King, Jed Prouty, Kenneth Thomson, Mary Doran, Eddie Kane, James Gleason, Nacio Herb Brown, Arthur Freed.
102m3:45 AM The Great Ziegfeld (1936)
Director: Robert Z. Leonard.
Cast: William Powell, Myrna Loy, Luise Rainer, Frank Morgan, Reginald Owen, Fanny Brice, Ray Bolger, Virginia Bruce, Nat Pendleton, Ernest Cossart, Joseph Cawthorn, Harriet Hoctor, Dennis Morgan, Robert Greig.
Singing Voice: Allan Jones.
180m6:45 AM The Sunshine Boys (1975)
Director: Herbert Ross.
Cast: Walter Matthau, George Burns, Richard Benjamin, Lee Meredith, Carol Arthur, F. Murray Abraham, Fritz Feld.
Cameos: Steve Allen, Phyllis Diller.
111m
“TCM Schedule: Best Adapted Screenplay, Entertainers” notes
“31 Days of Oscar” movie schedule via the TCM website.
Liza Minnelli and Joel Grey Cabaret image: ABC Pictures Corp.
“TCM Schedule: Best Adapted Screenplay, Entertainers” last modified in February 2025.