- TCM schedule – March 12–13: Turner Classic Movies will be airing 13 titles with Star of the Month Barbara Stanwyck, including Preston Sturges’ romantic comedy The Lady Eve, Frank Capra’s sociopolitical drama Meet John Doe, and William A. Wellman’s crime comedy Lady of Burlesque.
Barbara Stanwyck TCM schedule: The Lady Eve and Meet John Doe among 13 titles featuring the current ‘Star of the Month’
Turner Classic Movies’ March 2025 “Star of the Month” presentations continue on Wednesday evening, March 12, with 13 Barbara Stanwyck titles covering the years following the implementation of the Production Code in mid-1934 all the way to the post-World War II years. (See TCM’s Barbara Stanwyck schedule further below. Most titles will remain available for a while on the Watch TCM app.)
As mentioned in our previous Stanwyck article, notably missing from TCM’s “Star of the Month” roster are her 20th Century Fox titles of the mid-to-late 1930s: A Message to Garcia, Banjo on My Knee, This Is My Affair, and Always Goodbye.
Also nowhere to be found: A good chunk of her Paramount and Universal titles from the late 1930s to the early 1950s (most of these are now part of the NBCUniversal library): Internes Can’t Take Money, Union Pacific, The Great Man’s Lady, Flesh and Fantasy, The Bride Wore Boots, California, Variety Girl (in which Stanwyck is one of dozens of stars seen in cameos), The Lady Gambles, The File on Thelma Jordon, The Furies.
Plus Columbia Pictures’ Golden Boy and You Belong to Me. And United Artists’ The Other Love.
But don’t despair – too much: This week, you’ll be able to (re)watch Paramount’s The Lady Eve. And next week, TCM will be airing that studio’s Double Indemnity; Sorry, Wrong Number; and No Man of Her Own. And the following week it’ll broadcast several of Stanwyck’s Universal and United Artists titles of the 1950s (e.g., All I Desire, Witness to Murder, There’s Always Tomorrow).
Below are brief comments about each of Turner Classic Movies’ Barbara Stanwyck titles on March 12–13. Besides, we’ve also included a lone Kay Francis vehicle that somehow found itself squeezed between TCM’s “Star of the Month” presentations and its “Women Filmmakers” series.
The Lady Eve (1941)
Preston Sturges’ funniest effort, The Lady Eve provides Barbara Stanwyck with one of her best roles as a con artist out to relieve the rich of their weighty bank accounts. Leading man Henry Fonda wasn’t born to do comedy, but supporting player Eric Blore, one of the weirdest movie actors anywhere, was – and he greatly helps to turn The Lady Eve into the studio era classic it is.
The Lady Eve was nominated for one single Academy Award: Best Motion Picture Story for Monckton Hoffe.
Ball of Fire (1941)
Barbara Stanwyck delivered two of the most memorable performances of her career in 1941: As the titular con artist in Preston Sturges’The Lady Eve (see above) and as a less-than-ethical newspaper columnist in Frank Capra’s Meet John Doe (see below).
In early 1942 Stanwyck found herself in contention for the Best Actress Academy Award … for Howard Hawks’ Ball of Fire, in which she is in less than peak form as a slang-tongued nightclub performer named Sugarpuss O’Shea.
Screenplay by Charles Brackett and Billy Wilder, from Wilder’s and Thomas Monroe’s Academy Award-nominated motion picture story initially titled From A to Z.
Remember the Night (1940)
A romantic drama with comedic elements, director Mitchell Leisen and screenwriter Preston Sturges’ Remember the Night shows that romantic love makes people do the oddest things: Redeem themselves, corrupt themselves, wait patiently for somebody else to serve their prison sentence. If that – plus some concerned motherly advice by way of Beulah Bondi – is your thing, Remember the Night is the movie for you. (One of our reviewers very much appreciated it. To read his take on the film, click on the Remember the Night link in this paragraph.)
Meet John Doe (1941)
Love redeems Barbara Stanwyck’s newspaper columnist in Frank Capra’s drama Meet John Doe, in which she becomes professionally – and later romantically – enmeshed with hobo Gary Cooper, who, with her assistance, is used as a political pawn by the oligarch owner (Edward Arnold) of the publication where she works.
The Meet John Doe finale could have been a Capracornesque disaster; Stanwyck makes it immensely moving. Screenplay by the liberal-minded Robert Riskin, in his final collaboration with the Republican Capra.
For the longest time, Meet John Doe was available only in crummy prints. TCM has been airing a pristine one.
The Bride Walks Out (1936)
Leigh Jason’s The Bride Walks Out – as mediocre as but not to be confused with The Bride Comes Home (1935)* – is worth a look only because of its personable cast: Barbara Stanwyck as the wife with expensive tastes, Gene Raymond as the husband who can’t afford said tastes, and Robert Young (!) as the boozy millionaire who can. The movie itself is problematic, but the ending is particularly so.
* The Brides Comes Home stars Claudette Colbert, Fred MacMurray, and The Bride Walks Out’s Robert Young. Wesley Ruggles directed.
Breakfast for Two (1937)
About as inane and as unfunny as The Bride Walks Out, Alfred Santell’s Breakfast for Two has Texan heiress Barbara Stanwyck harnessing Herbert Marshall, who looks totally out of his element as a wealthy playboy. If that weren’t all, Marshall, however uncomfortably, is forced to prove his manliness by using his fists. More believable is Stanwyck using boxing gloves to punch some sense into her target.
The Secret Bride (1935)
Maybe not the greatest movie ever made, William Dieterle’s The Secret Bride has at the very least its cast to recommend it: Barbara Stanwyck as the title character and governor’s daughter, Warren William as her attorney general husband (but no one must know), Glenda Farrell (the other woman in Breakfast for Two) as his secretary, the underrated Grant Mitchell as the private secretary of a pardoned embezzler (Russell Hicks) who may have sent the governor (Arthur Byron) a little thank-you cash.
Ah, and let’s not forget The Secret Bride’s evergreen theme about the role of graft in politics.
Lady of Burlesque (1943)
William A. Wellman’s Lady of Burlesque is unrelated to the 1927 Broadway hit Burlesque,* which turned Barbara Stanwyck into a stage star and led to her film career. Instead, the former is a bowdlerized adaptation of stripper Gypsy Rose Lee’s 1941 novel The G-String Murders, which, in film form, may remind some of Warner Bros.’ 1929 murder-and-music release On with the Show.
Now, what’s most notable about Lady of Burlesque is how Barbara Stanwyck – a former chorus girl – gets to show the world that her dance abilities aren’t exactly awe-inspiring. (See also Ball of Fire.) Having said that, Stanwyck does look good in tights.
Bear in mind that in the past TCM has aired a yucky print of Lady of Burlesque. There are better ones around.
* George Manker Watters and Arthur Hopkins’ play Burlesque became the movies The Dance of Life (1929), with Nancy Carroll and Hal Skelly (who had also starred on Broadway); Swing High, Swing Low (1937), with Carole Lombard and Fred MacMurray; and When My Baby Smiles at Me (1948), with Betty Grable and Dan Dailey.
The Mad Miss Manton (1938)
Although not a well-known classic like The Awful Truth, Bringing Up Baby, and The Lady Eve, Leigh Jason’s The Mad Miss Manton is surprisingly entertaining, largely thanks to Barbara Stanwyck’s star turn as a socialite turned murder-solving detective and Hattie McDaniel as her no- – but absolutely no– – nonsense maid. The Lady Eve’s Henry Fonda is her news-reporting leading man.
Christmas in Connecticut (1945)
Far more amusing than what one might have expected, Peter Godfrey’s Christmas in Connecticut stars Barbara Stanwyck as a lifestyle magazine writer with a problem: Her actual lifestyle – urban, unmarried, childless – has nothing to do with her magazine lifestyle – rural, married, with baby. Her readers are stupid enough to believe whatever she tells them, but she must tread carefully when it comes to her publisher (Sydney Greenstreet).
Uh-oh, he now wants her to prepare a full-fledged Christmas dinner for a World War II hero (Dennis Morgan). Oh, what to do?
The Gay Sisters (1942)
In Irving Rapper’s The Gay Sisters, Barbara Stanwyck, Geraldine Fitzgerald, and Nancy Coleman play the titular characters: The Gay(lord) heiresses, land-rich but cash-poor. George Brent is the real-estate oligarch who wants the land where their mansion is located, but Stanwyck is loath to sell it. Romance inevitably blossoms.
Something else that blossomed as a result of The Gay Sisters was a new name for supporting player Byron Barr, who, like Dawn O’Day/Anne Shirley* a few years earlier, took on the name of his character, Gig Young.
* Following Anne of Green Gables (1934).
B.F.’s Daughter (1948)
Based on John P. Marquand’s 1946 novel, director Robert Z. Leonard and screenwriter Luther Davis’ B.F.’s Daughter is a conventional melodrama starring Barbara Stanwyck as the willful daughter of industrialist Charles Coburn (her con artist father in The Lady Eve) and wife of class-conscious intellectual Van Heflin. B.F.’s Daughter was a sizable money-loser ($565,000) for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer.
My Reputation (1946)
Filmed in 1944, Curtis Bernhardt’s My Reputation – a major box office hit for Warner Bros. – came out after World War II was over. Barbara Stanwyck plays a small-town widow who becomes involved with army sergeant George Brent.
A handsome production, My Reputation could have been a far more effective romantic drama had its moralizing message been more circumspect. Or even better, had it not been there at all. Besides, the widow would have made a better pair with lawyer Warner Anderson.
Although Stanwyck delivers a capable performance – as a woman in love/lust, not so much as a caring mom – the film’s scene stealer is veteran Lucile Watson as the widow’s reactionary mother, who believes that social rules exist for a reason and therefore one should do their utmost to follow them.
Note: Oddly, My Reputation (based on Clare Jaynes’ 1942 novel Instruct My Sorrows) has a couple of key elements in common – widowhood, fateful meeting in mountainous region – with another Barbara Stanwyck star vehicle, the 1934 release A Lost Lady (from Willa Cather’s 1923 novel).
Secrets of an Actress (1938)
Every time you read/hear someone say that sound ended dozens of careers because the stars in question had an accent, a lisp, a stutter, a stammer, or some other voice/speech issue, think of Kay Francis, one of the most popular, most glamorous, most ravishing screen luminaries of the 1930s – and one who had trouble pronouncing the letter “r.”
In William Keighley’s Secrets of an Actress, Francis plays the titular thespian, whose minor stage career (“nothing on Bwodway”) is about to get a great boost from “angel” Ian Hunter (an architect by profession) – if only his pal, fellow architect George Brent, doesn’t get in the way.
Hardly a great romantic drama, Secrets of an Actress is worth a look because glamorous, ravishing, etc. Kay Francis is in it. And that would be all except for the fact that Ian Hunter was a capable, personable, handsome actor who deserved a far better deal than what he, like so many others, got at Warner Bros.
In the past, TCM has shown a no more than passable print of Secrets of an Actress.
Immediately below is TCM’s Barbara Stanwyck movie schedule on March 12–13.
‘Star of the Month’ Barbara Stanwyck: TCM schedule (EDT) on March 12–13
8:00 PM The Lady Eve (1941)
Director: Preston Sturges.
Cast: Barbara Stanwyck, Henry Fonda, Charles Coburn, Eugene Pallette, Eric Blore, Melville Cooper, William Demarest, Janet Beecher, Martha O’Driscoll.
97 min. | Romantic Comedy.9:45 PM Ball of Fire (1942)
Director: Howard Hawks.
Cast: Gary Cooper, Barbara Stanwyck, Dana Andrews, Oskar Homolka, S.Z. Sakall, Richard Haydn, Dan Duryea, Leonid Kinskey, Tully Marshall.
111 min. | Romantic Comedy.11:45 PM Remember the Night (1940)
Director: Mitchell Leisen.
Cast: Barbara Stanwyck, Fred MacMurray, Beulah Bondi, Elizabeth Patterson, Willard Robertson, Sterling Holloway, Charles Waldron, Paul Guilfoyle.
94 min. | Romantic Comedy-Drama.1:30 AM Meet John Doe (1941)
Director: Frank Capra.
Cast: Gary Cooper, Barbara Stanwyck, Edward Arnold, Walter Brennan, Spring Byington, James Gleason, Gene Lockhart, Rod La Rocque, Regis Toomey.
123 min. | Sociopolitical Romantic Drama.3:45 AM The Bride Walks Out (1936)
Director: Leigh Jason.
Cast: Barbara Stanwyck, Gene Raymond, Robert Young, Ned Sparks, Helen Broderick, Willie Best, Robert Warwick, Billy Gilbert, Hattie McDaniel.
75 min. | Comedy.5:15 AM Breakfast for Two (1937)
Director: Alfred Santell.
Cast: Barbara Stanwyck, Herbert Marshall, Glenda Farrell, Eric Blore, Donald Meek, Etienne Girardot, Frank M. Thomas, Pierre Watkin.
65 min. | Romantic Comedy.6:30 AM The Secret Bride (1935)
Director: William Dieterle.
Cast: Barbara Stanwyck, Warren William, Glenda Farrell, Grant Mitchell, Arthur Byron, Henry O’Neill, Douglass Dumbrille, Arthur Aylesworth.
64 min. | Drama.7:45 AM Lady of Burlesque (1943)
Director: William A. Wellman.
Cast: Barbara Stanwyck, Michael O’Shea, Iris Adrian, J. Edward Bromberg, Gloria Dickson, Charles Dingle, Marion Martin.
91 min. | Crime Comedy.9:30 AM The Mad Miss Manton (1938)
Director: Leigh Jason.
Cast: Barbara Stanwyck, Henry Fonda, Sam Levene, Frances Mercer, Whitney Bourne, Stanley Ridges, Hattie McDaniel, Penny Singleton, Paul Guilfoyle, John Qualen.
65 min. | Crime Comedy.11:00 AM Christmas in Connecticut (1945)
Director: Peter Godfrey.
Cast: Barbara Stanwyck, Dennis Morgan, Sydney Greenstreet, Reginald Gardiner, S.Z. Sakall, Robert Shayne, Una O’Connor, Joyce Compton.
101 min. | Romantic Comedy.1:00 PM The Gay Sisters (1942)
Director: Irving Rapper.
Cast: Barbara Stanwyck, George Brent, Geraldine Fitzgerald, Donald Crisp, Gig Young, Nancy Coleman, Gene Lockhart, Donald Woods, Anne Revere.
108 min. | Drama.3:00 PM B.F.’s Daughter (1948)
Director: Robert Z. Leonard.
Cast: Barbara Stanwyck, Van Heflin, Charles Coburn, Richard Hart, Keenan Wynn, Margaret Lindsay, Spring Byington, Marshall Thompson, Barbara Laage.
108 min. | Romantic Drama.5:00 PM My Reputation (1946)
Director: Curtis Bernhardt.
Cast: Barbara Stanwyck, George Brent, Warner Anderson, Lucile Watson, John Ridgely, Eve Arden, Jerome Cowan, Esther Dale.
96 min. | Romantic Drama.6:45 PM Secrets of an Actress (1938)
Director: William Keighley.
Cast: Kay Francis, George Brent, Ian Hunter, Gloria Dickson, Isabel Jeans, Penny Singleton, Selmer Jackson, Herbert Rawlinson.
70 min. | Romantic Drama.
“Barbara Stanwyck TCM Schedule” notes/references
Barbara Stanwyck movie schedule via the TCM website.
Henry Fonda and Barbara Stanwyck in The Lady Eve image: Paramount Pictures.
“Barbara Stanwyck TCM Schedule: ‘Star of the Month'” last updated on March 2025.