- TCM schedule – Feb. 18: The series “31 Days of Oscar” continues with six Best Screenplay (whether Original or Adapted) Academy Award contenders and four titles featuring nominated Shakespearean characters, among them the TCM premiere of Kenneth Branagh’s Henry V.
TCM schedule – ‘31 Days of Oscar’ Day 18: 6 Best Screenplay contenders and 4 nominated Shakespearean adaptations
Turner Classic Movies’ 2025 edition of “31 Days of Oscar” continues on Tuesday, Feb. 18, with the airing of six Best Screenplay (whether Original or Adapted) contenders/winners, in addition to four Oscar-nominated or -winning titles centered Shakespearean characters: Emotionally unbalanced princes, warring kings, doomed lovers, murderous rebels. (See further below the TCM schedule on Feb. 18. Most titles will remain available for a while on the Watch TCM app.)
Below are brief comments about each TCM presentation.
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1931)
Starring Best Actor co-winner Fredric March* (for the period 1931–1932), Rouben Mamoulian’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde remains an impressive – if at times overly theatrical – effort.
Now, how could Miriam Hopkins – as the ill-fated sex worker – have been bypassed for that year’s Best Actress Academy Award?
For the record, the less-than-deserving nominees were Lynn Fontanne for The Guardsman, Marie Dressler for Emma, and, the eventual winner, Helen Hayes for The Sin of Madelon Claudet.
* For his performance in King Vidor’s The Champ, Wallace Beery received one less vote than Fredric March; that meant Beery and March were officially tied as per Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences regulations of the period.
Pygmalion (1938)
Best Actress nominee Wendy Hiller is laugh-out-loud fantastic in Leslie Howard and Anthony Asquith’s film version of George Bernard Shaw’s 1913 play that had starred Herbert Beerbohm Tree as snotty phonetics professor Henry Higgins and Mrs. Patrick Campbell as feisty Cockney flower-girl Eliza Doolittle.
Shaw himself – alongside Cecil Lewis, Ian Dalrymple, and W.P. Lipscomb – won that year’s Best Adapted Screenplay Oscar, something that irked him to no end.
Room at the Top (1959)
One of Britain’s so-called “kitchen sink dramas” of that era, Jack Clayton’s Oscar-nominated Room at the Top suffers as a result of two less-than-stellar lead performances – nominee Laurence Harvey, winner Simone Signoret* (actually in a subordinate role) – and a heavy-handed soap opera feel.
Best Supporting Actress nominee Hermione Baddeley, however, delivers an extraordinary tour de force in her one big scene, which happens to just about be her one scene. Indeed, according to online sources she has 2 minutes and 19 seconds of screen time – less than any other Academy Award nominee in the acting categories.
Neil Paterson was that year’s winner in the Best Adapted Screenplay category.
* Apart from Paris-born, U.S.-raised Claudette Colbert (It Happened One Night, 1934), Simone Signoret became the first French performer to win an Oscar. Additionally, Signoret was the first Best Actress winner in a non-Hollywood production.†
† Although partly shot at the MGM-British Studios at Borehamwood, in the outskirts of London, Anatole Litvak’s 1956 drama Anastasia, which earned Ingrid Bergman her second Best Actress Oscar (the first one was for Gaslight, 1944), was a 20th Century Fox effort.
Blackboard Jungle (1955)
Richard Brooks’ topical drama Blackboard Jungle stars Glenn Ford as a New York City high-school teacher at odds with unruly inner-city youths, among them future Best Actor Oscar winner Sidney Poitier (Lilies of the Field, 1963), then in his late 20s, and future filmmaker Paul Mazursky (Harry and Tonto, An Unmarried Woman), then in his mid-20s. Admittedly, Blackboard Jungle isn’t nearly as bad as it sounds.
Father of the Bride (1950)
Spencer Tracy is the one who received an Oscar nomination for playing the title character in Vincente Minnelli’s nominated “family” comedy Father of the Bride, but the one who gets the laughs is Tracy’s fellow veteran Joan Bennett as the Mother.
Oscar-nominated screenplay by Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett, based on Edward Streeter’s 1949 novel.
Friendly Persuasion (1956)
What’s the cure for a Quaker’s unmanly pledge of nonviolence?
War, of course, as attested in William Wyler’s Palme d’Or-winning and Academy Award-nominated period family drama Friendly Persuasion, which does feature capable work by leads Gary Cooper and Dorothy McGuire, both of whom were bypassed came Oscar time.
The film’s third lead character, played by Anthony Perkins, was shortlisted in the Best Supporting Actor category.
Friendly Persuasion was also in the running for Best Adapted Screenplay, though the name of its blacklisted screenwriter, Michael Wilson, was left out of the ballot.
Karma at work: That year’s Academy Award for Best Motion Picture Story went to The Brave One, written by blacklisted screenwriter Dalton Trumbo, working under the alias “Robert Rich.”
Hamlet (1948)
Laurence Olivier had to decide whether to be or not at the twenty-first Academy Awards ceremony. He chose not to, thus missing out on the chance to thank his Mother, his God, and, one assume, his Wife Vivien Leigh for helping him (as an actor) and his movie win Oscar statuettes.
Olivier, in fact, became the first actor to win an Oscar for a movie he himself directed, while Hamlet became the first non-Hollywood production to win Best Picture.
Mother, God, and Wife, however, were not enough for him to top the Best Director category; the winner was John Huston for The Treasure of the Sierra Madre.
Blond wig or no*, Jean Simmons (as Ophelia) lost the Best Supporting Actress Oscar to Claire Trevor in Key Largo, but one shouldn’t feel too sorry for her as she did eventually win a fruitful Hollywood career (e.g., Elmer Gantry, Spartacus) that would lead to a Best Actress nod in the late 1960s (The Happy Ending, 1969).
On the downside, Desmond Dickinson’s superb black-and-white cinematography was bypassed. But Hamlet did top two other Black-and-White categories: Best Art Direction (Roger K. Furse and Carmen Dillon) and the inaugural Best Costume Design (Roger K. Furse).
* Like Jean Simmons, Laurence Olivier dons a blond wig in Hamlet. That may also have been a Best Actor Oscar first.
Henry V (1989)
William Shakespeare fans will likely love actor-director Kenneth Branagh’s proudly theatrical Henry V – a TCM premiere.
Non-fans will just as likely remain unmoved.
But whatever you think of William Shakespeare’s works and of double Oscar nominee Kenneth Branagh and his movie, there’s an excellent chance you’ll enjoy the performance of the filmmaker’s then wife, Emma Thompson, in the (unfortunately) small role of King Charles VI’s daughter Katherine.
Phyllis Dalton won that year’s Best Costume Design Oscar.
Romeo and Juliet (1936)
Producer Irving G. Thalberg and director George Cukor’s handsomely mounted Romeo and Juliet probably remains the finest big-screen adaptation of Shakespeare’s play first published in 1597. Though old enough to be their characters’ grandparents, Leslie Howard and – especially – Best Actress nominee Norma Shearer are in top form.
Having been shot on location in Italy, Franco Zeffirelli’s Oscar-nominated 1968 version may look more realistic, but Thalberg and Cukor’s version, Culver City sets or no, feels more real.
Julius Caesar (1953)
After a night of wild partying, the members of the Academy’s Actors Branch went home and filled out their ballots. That explains how Marlon Brando ended up being shortlisted for the Best Actor Oscar for his portrayal of Mark Antony in Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s Julius Caesar while James Mason, as Brutus, was bypassed.
Brando isn’t bad, mind you, but Mason is nothing short of brilliant.
As for the movie itself, it could easily have been 15 or 20 minutes shorter, while some of the supporting players could have been made to deliver less theatrical characterizations.
Immediately below is TCM’s “31 Days of Oscar” movie schedule on Feb. 18.
‘31 Days of Oscar’: TCM schedule (EST) – Feb. 18
8:30 AM Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1931)
Director: Rouben Mamoulian.
Cast: Fredric March, Miriam Hopkins, Rose Hobart, Holmes Herbert, Halliwell Hobbes, Edgar Norton, Tempe Pigott.
96m10:15 AM Pygmalion (1938)
Director: Anthony Asquith.
Cast: Leslie Howard, Wendy Hiller, Wilfrid Lawson, Marie Lohr, Scott Sunderland, Jean Cadell, David Tree, Esme Percy, Irene Browne, Cathleen Nesbitt.
94m12:00 PM Room at the Top (1959)
Director: Jack Clayton.
Cast: Laurence Harvey, Simone Signoret, Heather Sears, Donald Wolfit, Donald Houston, Hermione Baddeley, Allan Cuthbertson.
115m2:00 PM Blackboard Jungle (1955)
Director: Richard Brooks.
Cast: Glenn Ford, Anne Francis, Louis Calhern, Margaret Hayes, John Hoyt, Richard Kiley, Basil Ruysdael, Warner Anderson, Sidney Poitier, Vic Morrow, Paul Mazursky, Jamie Farr.
101m3:45 PM Father of the Bride (1950)
Director: Vincente Minnelli.
Cast: Spencer Tracy, Joan Bennett, Elizabeth Taylor, Don Taylor, Billie Burke, Leo G. Carroll, Moroni Olsen, Melville Cooper, Russ Tamblyn.
93m5:30 PM Friendly Persuasion (1956)
Director: William Wyler.
Cast: Gary Cooper, Dorothy McGuire, Anthony Perkins, Marjorie Main, Richard Eyer, Theodore Newton, Edna Skinner.
137m8:00 PM Hamlet (1948)
Director: Laurence Olivier.
Cast: Laurence Olivier, Eileen Herlie, Jean Simmons, Basil Sydney, Norman Wooland, Stanley Holloway, Felix Aylmer, Terence Morgan, Niall MacGinnis, Esmond Knight, Anthony Quayle, Christopher Lee, Peter Cushing.
155m10:45 PM Henry V (1989)
Director: Kenneth Branagh.
Cast: Kenneth Branagh, Emma Thompson, Paul Scofield, Derek Jacobi, Judi Dench, Brian Blessed, Ian Holm, Christian Bale, Alec McCowen, James Larkin, Robbie Coltrane, Robert Stephens, Geraldine McEwan.
136m1:15 AM Romeo and Juliet (1936)
Director: George Cukor.
Cast: Norma Shearer, Leslie Howard, John Barrymore, Basil Rathbone, Edna May Oliver, Ralph Forbes, Reginald Denny, Conway Tearle, C. Aubrey Smith, Robert Warwick, Violet Kemble Cooper.
127m3:30 AM Julius Caesar (1953)
Director: Joseph L. Mankiewicz.
Cast: Marlon Brando, James Mason, Louis Calhern, Greer Garson, Deborah Kerr, John Gielgud, Edmond O’Brien, George Macready, Michael Pate, Douglass Watson, Edmund Purdom.
121m
“TCM Schedule: Best Screenplay, Shakespearean Characters” notes
“31 Days of Oscar” movie schedule via the TCM website.
Kenneth Branagh Henry V image: BBC | Renaissance Films.
“TCM Schedule: Best Screenplay, Shakespearean Characters” last modified in February 2025.