Turner Classic Movies

TCM is the one reason to have cable TV, since many of the movies they show are not available on DVD and are not shown elsewhere.  Before there was cable TV in New York I would use a stopwatch to time movies on TV between commercials and was not surprised that many movies ran short to allow more commercials and to shoehorn the films into particular time slots.  TCM shows movies uncut, uninterrupted and in the proper aspect ratio. The best movie I have seen on TCM recently was Phil Karlson's 99 River Street, intense and gritty.  I will say more about it later but for the moment I just wanted to mention what I think are the best films coming up on TCM in November:

Leo McCarey's The Awful Truth.  I often say that the best comedies are the most serious and this wonderfully funny film is a serious study of love and fidelity.

John Ford's Sergeant Rutledge, The Rising of the Moon, and The Searchers.  Ford, my favorite director, still has not gotten the recognition he deserves, though The Searchers has been widely praised in recent years and has even been the subject of Glenn Frankel's book The Searchers:  The Making of an American Legend, though that book is more about the historical background of the story than it is about John Ford.  Ford was supposedly one of the Klan riders in D.W. Griffith's The Birth of the Nation and his movies often deal with racism as a theme, very much the case in the two Westerns here. The Rising of the Moon is one of Ford's Irish films that, as Andrew Sarris says, "celebrates Ireland's very strangeness."

Blake Edwards's The Party.  When I saw this film at MoMA in the 80's there was a small riot in the auditorium when they showed a pan-and-scanned print of this wonderful wide-screen comedy.  Edwards uses all the space of the widescreen image for this deadpan low-key film about Hollywood.

John Huston's The Asphalt Jungle.  Jean-Pierre Melville said, in his interview with Rui Nogueira, that he came up with nineteen variations on his favorite cops-and-robbers situation and that The Asphalt Jungle uses them all.

I also recommend Lubitsch's To Be or Not To Be, McCarey's Love Affair, Lang's The Big Heat, and Preston Sturges's Christmas in July, all of which I will be writing about at some point.