- Turner Classic Movies’ “31 Days of Oscar” series continues on Feb. 5 with seven Academy Award contenders in the Best Story category (and variations) and five Oscar-nominated/-winning titles revolving around (mostly British) queens and kings.
TCM’s ‘31 Days of Oscar’: Day 5 offers 7 contenders in the Best Story category and 5 features about queens and kings
Turner Classic Movies’ 2025 edition of “31 Days of Oscar” continues on Wednesday, Feb. 5, with the airing of seven Best Story contenders/winners, in addition to five Oscar-nominated/-winning titles (in different categories) about royal – mostly British – personages. (See TCM’s Feb. 5 schedule further below. Most titles will remain available for a while on the Watch TCM app.)
Note: The Academy Awards’ Best Story category had its name changed several times over the course of three decades until it was done away with in 1957, when the “original screen story” category – referring to a draft, a treatment, an unproduced screenplay – became part of the Best Original (Story and) Screenplay Oscar.
Below are brief comments on each TCM presentation.
The Doorway to Hell (1930)
Lew Ayres – the nice World War I German soldier in Lewis Milestone’s Academy Award-winning masterpiece All Quiet on the Western Front – may not be anyone’s idea of a mob boss, but that doesn’t preclude Archie Mayo’s The Doorway to Hell from being a superior entry in the gangster genre than the better-known Little Caesar, The Public Enemy,* and Scarface.
Rowland Brown was nominated in the Best Original Story category for the period 1930–1931. The winner was John Monk Saunders for the World War I aviation drama The Dawn Patrol.
* Starring James Cagney, who has a supporting role in The Doorway to Hell. It should be noted that The Public Enemy was also a Best Original Story contender (John Bright and Kubec Glasmon).
One Way Passage (1932)
A precursor to the 1939 romantic melodrama Love Affair and its better-known 1957 remake An Affair to Remember, both directed by Leo McCarey, Tay Garnett’s One Way Passage stars William Powell and Kay Francis as two disparate people who fall in love while aboard an ocean liner sailing from Hong Kong to San Francisco, planning to meet again on New Year’s Eve.
Get your handkerchiefs ready: He’s on his way to the gallows; she’s terminally ill. And get your cinematic appreciation booklets ready as well, so you can note down the fine acting of the two leads; their moving final scene together; and the – shockingly touching – spectral finale.
Warner Bros. screenwriter Robert Lord, perhaps better known for the titles he (at times wrote and) produced (Footlight Parade, Confessions of a Nazi Spy), won the Best Original Story Academy Award for the period 1932–1933.
Manhattan Melodrama (1934)
A mostly conventional gangster drama, W.S. Van Dyke’s Manhattan Melodrama is chiefly notable for two things:
- It marked the first pairing of William Powell and Myrna Loy (alongside Clark Gable).
- It led to the death of John Dillinger, who attended a July 22 screening at Chicago’s Biograph Theater and was later shot by U.S. federal agents after leaving the building. If stories about him are to be believed, Dillinger was a Myrna Loy fan.
Manhattan Melodrama earned Arthur Caesar the Best Original Story Academy Award of 1934.
Action in the North Atlantic (1943)
Lloyd Bacon’s Action in the North Atlantic is one of countless routine World War II propaganda dramas cranked out by the Hollywood studios during the first half of the 1940s. Humphrey Bogart stars as a Merchant Marine officer, bravely fighting Nazis alongside fellow mariner Raymond Massey.
The Stratton Story (1949)
Sam Wood’s The Stratton Story chronicles the hardships faced by baseball player Monty Stratton (James Stewart), who loses a leg but not his love of the game. Syrupy situations are followed by schmaltzy ones, so make sure to check your blood sugar levels after sitting through this one.
On the plus side, James Stewart’s costar is June Allyson, who, whether in dramas or comedies, brought throaty honesty to her characters, no matter how phony the material.
Just bear in mind that The Stratton Story is a case of giving moviegoers the pap they crave: A major box office hit – like director Wood’s own 1942 blockbuster The Pride of the Yankees, starring Gary Cooper as Lou Gehrig – the 1949 movie ended up earning Douglas Morrow that year’s Best Motion Picture Story Oscar.
Love Me or Leave Me (1955)
Rehashing his pat psycho mobster persona, James Cagney earned a Best Actor Oscar nod for his portrayal of gangster Martin Snyder, a.k.a. “Moe the Gimp,” the abusive husband of torch singer Ruth Etting, in Charles Vidor’s blockbuster Love Me or Leave Me.
Etting is effectively played by Doris Day in one of her few dramatic roles. Indeed, Love Me or Leave Me is chiefly a Doris Day showcase, allowing her to prove that she could be a remarkable “serious” actress.
For the record, the Best Actress nominees that year were: Eleanor Parker for Interrupted Melody (as another singer, opera star Marjorie Lawerence), Susan Hayward for I’ll Cry Tomorrow (about a third singer, Lillian Roth), Katharine Hepburn for Summertime, Jennifer Jones for Love Is a Many-Splendored Thing, and the eventual winner, Anna Magnani for The Rose Tattoo.
The Brave One (1956)
A boy and his bull tale, Irving Rapper’s pro-life drama The Brave One – the boy doesn’t want his bull killed by a matador – is chiefly notable for three reasons:
- It was the last winner in the Oscars’ Best Original Story/Best Motion Picture Story category.
- Winner “Robert Rich” was eventually revealed to be blacklisted screenwriter Dalton Trumbo, working under an alias.
- All of its Mexican characters, including British-born lead Michel Ray,* speak fluent if (at times phonily) accented English.
The print of The Brave One previously shown on TCM is, to put it kindly, mediocre.
* Born to a British mother and a Brazilian (diplomat) father, Michel Ray de Carvalho would become an Olympic skier/luger and a financier, at one point holding the position of Citigroup’s vice chairman of investment banking.
Mrs. Brown (1997)
Having the feel of a well-made television movie – BBC One was its planned release venue – John Madden’s Mrs. Brown turned eventual Best Actress Oscar nominee Judi Dench, 63 or so, into a movie star.
You’d have to go back to winners Ruth Gordon (Rosemary’s Baby, 1968) and Marie Dressler (Min and Bill, 1930–1931) to find (sort of) similar cases of post-middle-age female movie stardom.
Of course, Mrs. Brown – the story of the relationship between Queen Victoria and the Scottish servant John Brown (played by Billy Connolly) – isn’t a comedy, but there’s something wildly funny about it: Delivering one of the most commanding performances of her (and anyone else’s) big-screen career, Judi Dench went on to … lose the Best Actress Oscar to Helen Hunt for her work in James L. Brooks’ crowd-pleasing comedy-drama As Good as It Gets.
The Lion in Winter (1968)
Director Anthony Harvey and screenwriter James Goldman’s film version of Goldman’s play The Lion in Winter stars Peter O’Toole and Katharine Hepburn as a sparring royal couple: Henry II of England (O’Toole had played the same character four years earlier in Becket) and Eleanor of Aquitaine. In a supporting role, Anthony Hopkins is a gay Richard the Lionheart.
Theatrically memorable, Katharine Hepburn shared that year’s Best Actress Oscar with Barbra Streisand for Funny Girl.
The Madness of King George (1994)
Making its stage roots even more visible than The Lion in Winter, director Nicholas Hytner and Alan Bennett’s The Madness of King George, based on Bennett’s own play, stars Best Actor nominee Nigel Hawthorne as George III.
Hawthorne’s is a showy, unabashedly theatrical performance, but John Wood, as Lord Chancellor Thurlow, is the one who quietly steals his every scene.
Marie Antoinette (1938)
W.S. Van Dyke’s sumptuous Marie Antoinette is TCM’s sole Wednesday evening presentation that doesn’t revolve around the British throne. Best Actress Oscar nominee and Queen of MGM Norma Shearer is fantastic as the Austrian-born French queen; indeed, her final scenes following the blood-thirsty French Revolution are some of cinema’s most heart-wrenching.
Bette Davis is fine as a willful Southern belle in Jezebel, but the 1938 Best Actress Oscar should have gone to Norma Shearer.
The Private Life of Henry VIII (1933)
For his effusive portrayal of King Henry VIII in Alexander Korda’s The Private Life of Henry VIII, Best Actor winner (1932–1933) Charles Laughton made Academy Award history by becoming the first performer to top one of the acting categories for work in a non-U.S. film.
A British production, The Private Life of Henry VIII became a major international hit, boosting not only Laughton’s career, but also those of three future Oscar-pedigreed performers – Best Actress nominee Merle Oberon (The Dark Angel, 1935), Best Actor winner Robert Donat (Goodbye, Mr. Chips, 1939), two-time supporting nominee Elsa Lanchester (Come to the Stable, 1949; Witness for the Prosecution, 1957) – in addition to Wendy Barrie and Binnie Barnes.
Immediately below is TCM’s “31 Days of Oscar” movie schedule on Feb. 5.
‘31 Days of Oscar’: TCM schedule (EST) – Feb. 5
7:15 AM The Doorway to Hell (1930)
Director: Archie Mayo.
Cast: Lew Ayres, Dorothy Mathews, Kenneth Thomson, James Cagney, Dwight Frye, Eddie Kane.
78 min.8:45 AM One Way Passage (1932)
Director: Tay Garnett.
Cast: William Powell, Kay Francis, Aline MacMahon, Frank McHugh, Warren Hymer, Frederick Burton.
69 min.10:00 AM Manhattan Melodrama (1934)
Director: W.S. Van Dyke.
Cast: Clark Gable, William Powell, Myrna Loy, Leo Carrillo, Nat Pendleton, George Sidney, Isabel Jewell, Mickey Rooney.
93 min.11:45 AM Action in the North Atlantic (1943)
Director: Lloyd Bacon.
Cast: Humphrey Bogart, Raymond Massey, Alan Hale, Julie Bishop, Ruth Gordon, Sam Levene, Dane Cark, Dick Hogan.
127 min.2:00 PM The Stratton Story (1949)
Director: Sam Wood.
Cast: James Stewart, June Allyson, Frank Morgan, Agnes Moorehead, Bill Williams, Bruce Cowling, Cliff Clark.
106 min.4:00 PM Love Me or Leave Me (1955)
Director: Charles Vidor.
Cast: Doris Day, James Cagney, Cameron Mitchell, Robert Keith, Tom Tully, Harry Bellaver, Richard Gaines, Peter Leeds.
122 min.6:15 PM The Brave One (1956)
Director: Irving Rapper.
Cast: Michel Ray, Rodolfo Hoyos, Elsa Cárdenas, Carlos Navarro.
100 min.8:00 PM Mrs. Brown (1997)
Director: John Madden.
Cast: Judi Dench, Gerard Butler, Billy Connolly, Geoffrey Palmer, Antony Sher, David Westhead, Richard Pasco.
105 min.10:00 PM The Lion in Winter (1968)
Director: Anthony Harvey.
Cast: Peter O’Toole, Katharine Hepburn, Anthony Hopkins, John Castle, Nigel Terry, Timothy Dalton, Jane Merrow, Nigel Stock.
134 min.12:30 AM The Madness of King George (1994)
Director: Nicholas Hytner.
Cast: Nigel Hawthorne, Helen Mirren, Rupert Graves, Ian Holm, Amanda Donohoe, John Wood, Rupert Everett, Geoffrey Palmer, Jim Carter.
110 min.2:30 AM Marie Antoinette (1938)
Director: W.S. Van Dyke.
Cast: Norma Shearer, Tyrone Power, John Barrymore, Robert Morley, Anita Louise, Joseph Schildkraut, Gladys George, Henry Stephenson, Cora Witherspoon, Reginald Gardiner, Henry Daniell, Albert Dekker, Alma Kruger, Scotty Beckett.
157 min.5:15 AM The Private Life of Henry VIII (1933)
Director: Alexander Korda.
Cast: Charles Laughton, Merle Oberon, Wendy Barrie, Elsa Lanchester, Binnie Barnes, Robert Donat, Everley Gregg, John Loder, Miles Mander.
93 min.
“TCM Oscar Series: Best Original Story, Movie Royals” notes/references
“31 Days of Oscar” movie schedule via the TCM website.
Myrna Loy and Clark Gable Manhattan Melodrama image: Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer.
“TCM Oscar Series: Best Original Story, Movie Royals” last modified in February 2025.