Turner Classic Movies in November 2015

King Vidor's moving populist drama, The Crowd (1928) is showing on Nov. 1, followed by Chaplin's The Great Dictator (1940) on the 2nd and Chaplin's The Circus (1928) on the 3rd.  When I first started going to the movies in the late sixties none of Chaplin's films were available except for The Gold Rush (1925), which had fallen into the public domain.  The Circus was the first of Chaplin's films to be re-released in the seventies and gradually they all returned, even A Woman of Paris (1923), which Chaplin felt would be considered too "old-fashioned."  Chaplin's Limelight (1953), a late and moving work, will be shown on Nov. 9.

John Ford is my favorite director, by far, and there is some of his best work on Turner in Nov. Mogambo (1953), an unusual Ford film that takes place in Africa, is showing on the 13th and My Darling Clementine (1946), which I wrote about on Feb.4, 2014, is showing on the 16th. Two more of Ford's films are showing in the Nov. 20 tribute to Maureen O'Hara:  The Quiet Man (1952) and Wings of Eagles (1957).

Earlier this year I earned a Certificate of Completion in the TCM and Ball State University multimedia course Into The Darkness: Investigating Film Noir; there are several excellent examples of the genre in November.  What some consider the definitive film noir, Jacques Tourneur's Out of the Past (1947) is showing on Nov. 5, as is Howard Hawks's To Have and Have Not (1944).  On Nov. 7th is Joseph Losey's corrosive The Prowler, followed on the 8th by Raoul Walsh's White Heat (1949), more of a gangster film.

Other films on Turner this month include Anthony Mann's God's Little Acre (1958) on the 11th (I wrote about Erskine Caldwell's novel on Sept. 6 of this year), Jacques Demy's brightly-colored musical The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (1964) on the 13th, Rossellini's  rigorous The Flowers of St. Francis (1950) on the 13th, Minnelli's dreamlike melodrama Some Came Running (1958) on the 23rd, Samuel Fuller's intensive geometric war film Merrill's Marauders (1962) on the 24th and the best screwball comedy, Howard Hawks's Bringing Up Baby (1938) on Nov 27.