- TCM schedule – Feb. 20: The series “31 Days of Oscar” continues with eight Best Director Academy Award contenders and six titles featuring Oscar-nominated convicts, including The Defiant Ones, I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang, and Caged.
TCM schedule – ‘31 Days of Oscar’ Day 20: 8 Best Director contenders and 6 titles showcasing nominated convicts
Turner Classic Movies’ 2025 edition of “31 Days of Oscar” continues on Thursday, Feb. 20, with the airing of eight Best Director contenders/winners, in addition to six titles featuring Oscar-nominated convicts: Bird-studying, chain-ball-shackled, communication-deficient. (See further below the TCM schedule on Feb. 20. Most titles will remain available for a while on the Watch TCM app.)
Below are brief comments about each TCM presentation.
The Human Comedy (1943)
With the assistance of Harry Stradling’s evocative black-and-white cinematography, Best Director nominee Clarence Brown succeeds in adding some degree of poetry to the mundane narrative found in the small-town-set The Human Comedy.
Best Actor nominee Mickey Rooney, then in his early 20s and married to/about to divorce Ava Gardner, plays a high-schooler and telegram delivery boy not all that different from the insufferable Andy Hardy.
William Saroyan wrote The Human Comedy for the movies before it became a novel. Hence its Best Original Motion Picture Story Academy Award win.
The Crowd (1928)
Generally speaking, a Best Director Oscar nomination means a matching Best Picture nod. But not always. Cases in point among TCM’s Feb. 20 movies: The Crowd, The Divine Lady, Bad Day at Black Rock, The Search, I Want to Live!.
Oh, but wait.
Directed by King Vidor*, The Crowd did get shortlisted in the Best Unique and Artistic Picture category, created for the first Academy Award ceremony (1927–1928) and destroyed before the second one. From then on, arthouse and commercial productions would compete on the same roster.
F.W. Murnau’s Sunrise was named Best Unique and Artistic Picture, but The Crowd should have been the chosen one. Besides, leads Eleanor Boardman (then married to Vidor) and James Murray (whose life would take a tragic turn)† should have been at the very least nominated.
* King Vidor was shortlisted in the Best Director – Dramatic Picture category; he lost to Frank Borzage for 7th Heaven. Lewis Milestone topped the Best Director – Comedy Picture category for Two Arabian Knights.
Like the Best Unique and Artistic Picture category, the Academy Awards’ drama/comedy split was zapped after the first ceremony.
† The son of Irish immigrants, The Bronx-born James Murray reached his professional apex with The Crowd and second-lead roles in two late-1920s Lon Chaney star vehicles, The Big City and Thunder. Shortly afterwards, Murray’s career suffered a steep downturn reportedly because of his severe alcoholism.
On July 11, 1936, the 35-year-old ex-actor-turned-panhandler either fell or jumped into New York City’s North River pier.
The Divine Lady (1929)
A lush silent production, Best Director winner Frank Lloyd’s The Divine Lady stars an ethereal Corinne Griffith, who, had there been any justice, would have shared that year’s (1928–1929) Best Actress Academy Award with The Broadway Melody’s Bessie Love.
That year’s Best Actress winner was Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences co-founder Mary Pickford for Coquette. Pickford should have won for The Hoodlum – had the Academy Awards been around a decade earlier.
Stage Door (1937)
Gregory La Cava’s Stage Door may not have been the first movie to feature overlapping dialogue, but the filmmaker does make great use of his yapping actresses, among them Katharine Hepburn (“The calla lilies are in bloom again”), Ginger Rogers, Lucille Ball, Gail Patrick, Constance Collier, Ann Miller, Eve Arden, and Best Supporting Actress nominee Andrea Leeds.
Bad Day at Black Rock (1955)
John Sturges’ Bad Day at Black Rock stars a surprisingly effective Oscar-nominated Spencer Tracy – at the beginning of his Grand Seigneur phase – as a one-armed stranger who, in late 1945, arrives by train in the California desert town of Black Rock looking for a Japanese-American man named Komoko. That sets off the natives.
But why?
Excellent color cinematography by William C. Mellor.
The Search (1948)
In Fred Zinnemann’s sentimental U.S.-Swiss drama The Search, Best Actor Oscar nominee Montgomery Clift stars as a U.S. Army engineer stationed in postwar Germany, where he helps a pre-teen Auschwitz survivor from Czechoslovakia look for his mother amidst towns and cities turned to rubble.
As the boy, Ivan Jandl delivers a moving performance that earned him the Academy’s sporadically presented Juvenile Award. Prague-born soprano and Metropolitan Opera star Jarmila Novotná plays his mother.
The Thin Man (1934)
Even if a bit creaky, W.S. Van Dyke’s The Thin Man continues to amuse more than nine decades after its initial release. What matters most here isn’t whodunit, why, or where’s the body, but the assorted weirdo characters that populate the narrative.
One major mistake: Leaving Myrna Loy out of several crucial scenes. True, her character is of small importance in Dashiell Hammett’s far more hardboiled 1933 novel, but Loy’s on-screen presence is essential for the film’s success.
The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948)
A box office disappointment, John Huston’s The Treasure of the Sierra Madre is one of the few movies that gave underrated B cowboy star Tim Holt (The Magnificent Ambersons) the chance to act. Holt’s presence, in fact, is reason enough to check this one out, which also features Humphrey Bogart, who, admittedly, does try (hard), and the filmmaker’s father, Walter Huston.
The younger Huston won two Oscars: Best Director and Best Screenplay. The older one topped the Best Supporting Actor category.
Nearly four decades later, John Huston would help daughter Anjelica Huston take home the 1985 Best Supporting Actress Oscar statuette for Prizzi’s Honor.
Back to The Treasure of the Sierra Madre: Try to spot Ann Sheridan in a supposed cameo. You’ll fail.
Birdman of Alcatraz (1962)
Best Actor nominee Burt Lancaster is believable as bird-studying convict Robert Stroud in John Frankenheimer’s handsomely produced – if a bit overlong – real-life-inspired Birdman of Alcatraz.
As Stroud’s mother, Thelma Ritter received her sixth and final Best Supporting Actress Oscar nomination – a record to this day.
The Defiant Ones (1958)
Oscar-nominated director Stanley Kramer and Oscar-winning writers Harold Jacob Smith and Nedrick Young’s* well-intentioned drama The Defiant Ones stars nominees Tony Curtis and Sidney Poitier as two escaped convicts who, shackled together, must learn to also work together.
The Defiant Ones is the sort of the movie that will undoubtedly appeal to those who find Paul McCartney and Stevie Wonder’s “Ebony and Ivory” a great song.
As for that famous – or rather, by now, notoriously over-repeated – black-hand-on-white-hand closeup, you can find something similar but more subtly and artistically done in Clarence Brown’s Intruder in the Dust, in the scene when Claude Jarman Jr. goes to visit Juano Hernandez in prison.
If you want a truly daring Stanley Kramer title, check out The Sniper (1952), which Kramer produced and Edward Dmytryk directed.
* Blacklisted at the time for his progressive/leftist views, Nedrick Young was originally credited as Nathan E. Douglas on the progressive-minded The Defiant Ones. Now, stop and think about this.
I Want to Live! (1958)
Produced by Walter Wanger, who had spent four months in jail for shooting and wounding Jennings Lang, the MCA talent agent of Wanger’s movie star wife Joan Bennett, the critical and box office hit I Want to Live! earned earned Oscar nods for director Robert Wise and screenwriter Don Mankiewicz, and that year’s Best Actress Oscar statuette for star Susan Hayward in the role of real-life sex worker Barbara Graham, convicted of murder and sentenced to the gas chamber in California.
Cool Hand Luke (1967)
Communication lines are brutally severed in Stuart Rosenberg’s old-fashioned prison drama Cool Hand Luke, starring rebellious Oscar-nominated convict Paul Newman and featuring Strother Martin as a fascist prison camp warden in 1950s Florida.
As the big, tough leader of the camp’s prisoners, George Kennedy received that year’s Best Supporting Actor Academy Award. Yet Cool Hand Luke’s thespian highlight is veteran Oscar winner Jo Van Fleet (East of Eden, 1955), briefly but memorably seen as Newman’s ailing mother.
I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang (1932)
Best Actor Academy Award nominee Paul Muni delivers a restrained performance – well, “restrained” by Muni standards – in Mervyn LeRoy’s still effective sociopolitical drama I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang, whose most notable trait is that there’s no rosy ending.
Caged (1950)
Also lacking a rosy ending is John Cromwell’s compelling women’s prison drama Caged, starring Best Actress Oscar nominee Eleanor Parker – at her finest – as an innocent who “will be back” after spending time, like Paul Muni in I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang, as a victim of the United States’ justice/penal system.
Also effective: Best Supporting Actress nominee Hope Emerson as the “stern” – unfeeling, unforgiving, downright sadistic – prison matron with lesbian inclinations.
Immediately below is TCM’s “31 Days of Oscar” movie schedule on Feb. 20.
‘31 Days of Oscar’: TCM schedule (EST) – Feb. 20
4:30 AM The Human Comedy (1943)
Director: Clarence Brown.
Cast: Mickey Rooney, Frank Morgan, James Craig, Marsha Hunt, Fay Bainter, Van Johnson, Donna Reed, Jackie Jenkins, Katharine Alexander, Alan Baxter, Barry Nelson, Robert Mitchum, Don Taylor.
118m6:30 AM The Crowd (1928)
Director: King Vidor.
Cast: Eleanor Boardman, James Murray, Bert Roach, Dell Henderson, Lucy Beaumont, Estelle Clark.
93m8:15 AM The Divine Lady (1929)
Director: Frank Lloyd.
Cast: Corinne Griffith, Victor Varconi, H.B. Warner, Marie Dressler, Ian Keith, Montagu Love, Dorothy Cumming, Michael Vavitch, Helen Jerome Eddy.
110m10:15 AM Stage Door (1937)
Director: Gregory La Cava.
Cast: Katharine Hepburn, Ginger Rogers, Adolphe Menjou, Lucille Ball, Gail Patrick, Constance Collier, Andrea Leeds, Eve Arden, Ann Miller, Franklin Pangborn, Jack Carson.
83m12:15 PM Bad Day at Black Rock (1955)
Director: John Sturges.
Cast: Spencer Tracy, Robert Ryan, Anne Francis, Lee Marvin, Ernest Borgnine, John Ericson, Dean Jagger, Walter Brennan.
81m2:00 PM The Search (1948)
Director: Fred Zinnemann.
Cast: Montgomery Clift, Aline MacMahon, Wendell Corey, Ivan Jandl, Jarmila Novotná, Leopold Borkowski.
105m4:00 PM The Thin Man (1934)
Director: W.S. Van Dyke.
Cast: William Powell, Myrna Loy, Maureen O’Sullivan, Nat Pendleton, Minna Gombell, Henry Wadsworth, William Henry, Cesar Romero, Natalie Moorhead, Edward Brophy.
91m5:45 PM The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948)
Director: John Huston.
Cast: Humphrey Bogart, Walter Huston, Tim Holt, Bruce Bennett, Barton MacLane, Alfonso Bedoya, Robert Blake, Jack Holt.
126m8:00 PM Birdman of Alcatraz (1962)
Director: John Frankenheimer.
Cast: Burt Lancaster, Karl Malden, Thelma Ritter, Betty Field, Neville Brand, Telly Savalas, Edmond O’Brien, Hugh Marlowe.
147m10:45 PM The Defiant Ones (1958)
Director: Stanley Kramer.
Cast: Tony Curtis, Sidney Poitier, Theodore Bikel, Cara Williams, Charles McGraw, Lon Chaney Jr., King Donovan, Claude Akins.
97m12:30 AM I Want to Live! (1958)
Director: Robert Wise.
Cast: Susan Hayward, Simon Oakland, Virginia Vincent, Theodore Bikel, Wesley Lau, Philip Coolidge, John Marley, Gavin MacLeod.
120m2:45 AM Cool Hand Luke (1967)
Director: Stuart Rosenberg.
Cast: Paul Newman, George Kennedy, Strother Martin, Jo Van Fleet, Joy Harmon, Luke Askew, Morgan Woodward, Richard Davalos, Wayne Rogers, Dennis Hopper, Ralph Waite, Harry Dean Stanton.
129m5:00 AM I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang (1932)
Director: Mervyn Le Roy.
Cast: Paul Muni, Glenda Farrell, Helen Vinson, Noel Francis, Preston Foster, Allen Jenkins, Berton Churchill, Sally Blane, Robert Warwick.
93m6:45 AM Caged (1950)
Director: John Cromwell.
Cast: Eleanor Parker, Agnes Moorehead, Ellen Corby, Hope Emerson, Betty Garde, Jan Sterling, Lee Patrick, Jane Darwell, Gertrude Michael.
96m
“TCM Schedule: Best Director Oscar, Convicts” notes
“31 Days of Oscar” movie schedule via the TCM website.
Tony Curtis and Sidney Poitier The Defiant Ones image: Stanley Kramer Productions | United Artists.
“TCM Schedule: Best Director Oscar, Convicts” last modified in February 2025.