- TCM schedule – Feb. 22: The series “31 Days of Oscar” continues with seven Best Picture Academy Award contenders and five titles featuring Oscar-nominated soldiers, including An Officer and a Gentleman, The Best Years of Our Lives, and The Story of G.I. Joe.
TCM schedule – ‘31 Days of Oscar’ Day 22: 7 Best Picture contenders and 5 titles featuring nominated soldiers
Turner Classic Movies’ 2025 edition of “31 Days of Oscar” continues on Saturday, Feb. 22, with the airing of seven Best Picture Academy Award contenders/winners from the period 1928–1929 to 1981, in addition to five titles featuring nominated U.S. soldiers, whether training for war, at war, or returning from war. (See further below the TCM schedule on Feb. 22. Most titles will remain available for a while on the Watch TCM app.)
Below are brief comments about each TCM presentation.
The Hollywood Revue of 1929 (1929)
Less a movie than a series of filmed vaudeville sketches, Charles Reisner’s The Hollywood Revue of 1929 showcases Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer’s contract stars and featured players at the dawn of the microphone era.
Just about everyone is there: Norma Shearer, Joan Crawford, John Gilbert, Marion Davies, Marie Dressler, William Haines, Buster Keaton, etc. Notable exceptions: Greta Garbo, Ramon Novarro, and Lon Chaney.
See if you can spot future Warner Bros. leading woman Ann Dvorak as one of the unbilled chorus girls. It can be done.
A Tale of Two Cities (1935)
Bypassed at the Academy Awards, Ronald Colman shines in Jack Conway’s A Tale of Two Cities, undoubtedly one of the finest big-screen transfers of a Charles Dickens novel. Dirk Bogarde starred in the less well-received 1958 remake.
Colman would finally take home the Best Actor Oscar for his exceptional star turn as an unbalanced Shakespearean actor in George Cukor’s 1947 psychological drama A Double Life.
Naughty Marietta (1935)
Laugh all you want, but the profiles of Jeanette MacDonald and Nelson Eddy singing “Ah! Sweet Mystery of Life” at the musical-romantic climax of W.S. Van Dyke’s Naughty Marietta is pure movie magic.
In the past, the print aired on TCM didn’t do justice to this – admittedly, mostly LOL-inducing camp – classic.
The Maltese Falcon (1941)
After ten years as a minor Hollywood leading man and mid-level supporting player, Humphrey Bogart was catapulted to stardom as a result of John Huston’s The Maltese Falcon and Raoul Walsh’s High Sierra. Never mind that Ricardo Cortez is a more effective Sam Spade in Roy Del Ruth’s less moody but racier 1931 version.
The supporting cast in the 1941 movie, however, is first-rate: Mary Astor (pretty much a co-leading role), Peter Lorre, Elisha Cook Jr., Lee Patrick, and Oscar nominee Sydney Greenstreet, who should have won that year. (Tied with Charles Coburn – actually in a leading role – in The Devil and Miss Jones.)
For the record, the 1941 Best Supporting Actor Oscar went to Donald Crisp for How Green Was My Valley.
Ivanhoe (1952)
Starring Robert Taylor, Joan Fontaine, and Elizabeth Taylor, Richard Thorpe’s Ivanhoe is one the best historical adventures made in Hollywood – or anywhere else. There is a great-looking print out there; perhaps TCM will make it available one day. Of note, the male Taylor and Fontaine are particularly good.
Stagecoach (1939)
Considered by some the greatest Western ever made, John Ford’s Stagecoach features an excellent score (Richard Hageman, Franke Harling, and others), superlative editing (Otho Lovering & Dorothy Spencer), a solid screenplay (Dudley Nichols), several quality performances (e.g., Claire Trevor, Donald Meek), a wooden leading man (John Wayne), and repugnant action sequences featuring tumbling horses and vicious injuns.
As an unwashed alcoholic physician not that different from his other portrayals – see Only Angels Have Wings, Moontide, etc. – Thomas Mitchell was the Best Supporting Actor Oscar winner of 1939. That same year, Cedric Hardwicke didn’t as much as receive a nomination for his flawless work in William Dieterle’s The Hunchback of Notre Dame.
Although officially based on Ernest Haycox’s 1937 short story “The Stage to Lordsburg” published in Collier’s magazine, Stagecoach clearly borrows key elements from Guy de Maupassant’s 1880 short story “Boule de Suif.”
An aside: Micheline Presle delivers a spot-on performance as the titular character in Christian-Jaque’s classy 1945 adaptation of de Maupassant’s story, renamed Angel and Sinner in English-language markets.
Chariots of Fire (1981)
The year Mark Rydell’s On Golden Pond and Warren Beatty’s Reds went head-to-head for the Best Picture Academy Award, the winner turned out to be Hugh Hudson’s British-made period sports drama Chariots of Fire.
One could say that was a replay of the 1952 Oscar ceremony, when George Stevens’ A Place in the Sun and Elia Kazan’s A Streetcar Named Desire were expected to take home the golden statuette that went instead to Vincente Minnelli’s An American in Paris.
Now, ignore the “split the vote” nonsense. Votes are always split among the five competing titles, actors, directors, etc. If a dark horse wins to everyone’s shock and horror, it’s because prognosticators weren’t doing their job properly; in the case of Chariots of Fire, had they taken the trouble to ask around they would have undoubtedly found out that director Hudson and screenwriter Colin Welland’s traditional feel-good drama had enough fans to have a solid chance at winning Best Picture.
Even if Reds was the superior movie. (Note: Warren Beatty did win Best Director.)
Keep in mind that you don’t need a majority of the vote to win in most Oscar categories. A relatively small percentage of ballots with your name on them, say, one in four or one in three, could easily suffice.
Sergeant York (1941)
The phony story of how a God-fearing pacifist learned to stop worrying and love his rifle, Howard Hawks’ Sergeant York was one of the 1940s’ biggest blockbusters, ultimately garnering 11 Academy Award nominations, including Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Original Screenplay. However undeservedly, it topped two categories: Best Actor (Gary Cooper, at his folksiest) and Best Film Editing (William Holmes).
An Officer and a Gentleman (1982)
An Officer and a Gentleman isn’t a bad movie. It’s worse. Richard Gere stars as a lowlife who finds his inner chevalier after joining the U.S. military. In a thankless subordinate role, Oscar nominee Debra Winger – in American cinema, Best Actress pickings were pretty slim in the early 1980s – plays his romantic interest.
Taylor Hackford directed An Officer and a Gentleman from an Oscar-nominated screenplay by Douglas Day Stewart. Among the Best Supporting Actor contenders that year were veterans James Mason for The Verdict and Robert Preston for Victor/Victoria, but enough Academy members chose instead Louis Gossett Jr. in the role of Gere’s uniformed gentleman-maker.
Now, in case An Officer and a Gentleman’s final scene makes your heart flutter, don’t despair. Surely you can find professional help in your corner of the planet.
Having said that … In case the Oscar-winning song “Up Where We Belong” also leaves you all fluttery, then maybe it’s time for you to start despairing. (Music by Jack Nitzsche and Buffy Sainte-Marie; lyrics by Will Jennings.)
The Best Years of Our Lives (1946)
The An Officer and a Gentleman of its day….*
William Wyler’s critical and commercial hit The Best Years of Our Lives won a total of seven competitive Academy Awards: Best Picture, Best Director, Best Screenplay (Robert E. Sherwood; from MacKinlay Kantor’s 1945 novella Glory and Me), Best Actor (Fredric March), Best Supporting Actor (Harold Russell), Best Film Editing (Daniel Mandell), and Best Scoring of a Dramatic or Comedy Picture (Hugo Friedhofer).
Even if oversentimentalized, The Best Years of Our Lives is unquestionably a noteworthy depiction of a crucial time in U.S. history. Of the name cast, Fredric March and top-billed Myrna Loy are the standouts.
* (Joke.)
The Story of G.I. Joe (1945)
Hailed by some as a realistic portrayal of soldiers at war, William A. Wellman’s The Story of G.I. Joe is anything but, as a large chunk of the movie reeks of Hollywood artificiality in the situations, the dialogue, and the acting.
Future two-time Oscar nominee Burgess Meredith (The Day of the Locust, 1975; Rocky, 1976) overacts as war correspondent Ernie Pyle, on whose works the movie is based. On the other hand, eventual Best Supporting Actor Oscar nominee Robert Mitchum isn’t bad. (The deserving winner that year was veteran James Dunn for Elia Kazan’s A Tree Grows in Brooklyn.)
Battleground (1949)
Another widely acclaimed and mostly phony World War II Hollywood movie, Battleground, also directed by William A. Wellman, follows the members of a fictional U.S. Infantry Regiment as they face death and mayhem on their way to fight German forces in the Ardennes.
A sizable box office hit, Battleground received a total of six Academy Award nominations, including Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Supporting Actor (James Whitmore). It topped two categories: Best Story and Screenplay (Robert Pirosh) and Best Cinematography – Black-and-White (Paul C. Vogel). (Note: Vogel was a deserving winner; our pick, however, would have been Leo Tover for The Heiress.)
Also of note, the most disturbing scene in Battleground doesn’t feature any warring humans, regardless of nationality, ethnicity or what-have-you, but a nameless, countryless, ethnicless dog.
Immediately below is TCM’s “31 Days of Oscar” movie schedule on Feb. 22.
‘31 Days of Oscar’: TCM schedule (EST) – Feb. 22
5:30 AM The Hollywood Revue of 1929 (1929)
Director: Charles Reisner.
Cast: Conrad Nagel, Jack Benny, Joan Crawford, Marion Davies, John Gilbert, Norma Shearer, Charles King, Bessie Love, Anita Page, Marie Dressler, Polly Moran, William Haines, Buster Keaton, Lionel Barrymore, Stan Laurel, Oliver Hardy, George K. Arthur, Karl Dane, Gwen Lee, Cliff Edwards.
116m7:45 AM A Tale of Two Cities (1935)
Director: Jack Conway.
Cast: Ronald Colman, Elizabeth Allan, Edna May Oliver, Reginald Owen, Basil Rathbone, Blanche Yurka, Donald Woods, Lucille La Verne.
120m10:00 AM Naughty Marietta (1935)
Director: W.S. Van Dyke.
Cast: Jeanette MacDonald, Nelson Eddy, Frank Morgan, Elsa Lanchester, Douglass Dumbrille, Cecilia Parker, Walter Kingsford, Edward Brophy, Akim Tamiroff.
80m12:00 PM The Maltese Falcon (1941)
Director: John Huston.
Cast: Humphrey Bogart, Mary Astor, Gladys George, Sydney Greenstreet, Peter Lorre, Elisha Cook Jr., Barton MacLane, Lee Patrick, Jerome Cowan, Ward Bond, James Burke, Murray Alper, Charles Drake.
Cameo: Walter Huston.
100m2:00 PM Ivanhoe (1952)
Director: Richard Thorpe.
Cast: Robert Taylor, Elizabeth Taylor, Joan Fontaine, George Sanders, Finlay Currie, Emlyn Williams, Robert Douglas, Felix Aylmer.
106m4:00 PM Stagecoach (1939)
Director: John Ford.
Cast: Claire Trevor, John Wayne, Andy Devine, John Carradine, Thomas Mitchell, Louise Platt, George Bancroft, Donald Meek, Tim Holt, Tom Tyler.
96m5:45 PM Chariots of Fire (1981)
Director: Hugh Hudson.
Cast: Ben Cross, Ian Charleson, Nigel Havers, Nicholas Farrell, Ian Holm, John Gielgud, Lindsay Anderson, Alice Krige, Nigel Davenport, Patrick Magee, Richard Griffiths, Brad Davis, Dennis Christopher.
121m8:00 PM Sergeant York (1941)
Director: Howard Hawks.
Cast: Gary Cooper, Joan Leslie, Walter Brennan, Margaret Wycherly, George Tobias, June Lockhart, Dickie Moore, David Bruce.
134m10:30 PM An Officer and a Gentleman (1982)
Director: Taylor Hackford.
Cast: Richard Gere, Debra Winger, David Keith, Louis Gossett Jr., Lisa Blount, David Caruso.
124m12:45 AM The Best Years of Our Lives (1946)
Director: William Wyler.
Cast: Myrna Loy, Fredric March, Dana Andrews, Teresa Wright, Gladys George, Virginia Mayo, Cathy O’Donnell, Harold Russell, Hoagy Carmichael, Steve Cochran.
172m3:45 AM The Story of G.I. Joe (1945)
Director: William A. Wellman.
Cast: Burgess Meredith, Robert Mitchum, Freddie Steele, Wally Cassell, Jimmy Lloyd, William Murphy, John R. Reilly, Tito Renaldo.
109m5:45 AM Battleground (1949)
Director: William A. Wellman.
Cast: Van Johnson, John Hodiak, Ricardo Montalban, James Whitmore, George Murphy, Marshall Thompson, Jerome Courtland, Don Taylor, Denise Darcel.
118m
“TCM Schedule: Best Picture Oscar, Soldiers” notes
“31 Days of Oscar” movie schedule via the TCM website.
Richard Gere and Debra Winger An Officer and a Gentleman image: Paramount Pictures.
“TCM Schedule: Best Picture Oscar, Soldiers” last modified in February 2025.