TCM Monthly Preview: August 2025
August is different. Every year TCM does this, and every year I am newly grateful for it. Summer Under the Stars means exactly what it says: one star per day, all day, from roughly 6am to 5am, a complete filmography in a single sweep. There are no thematic Spotlights, no Noir Alley, no TCM Imports, no Silent Sunday Nights - just 31 consecutive days of individual star tributes, one per day, the whole month given over to the exercise of immersive career retrospective. It's the closest thing TCM does to a film festival dedicated to a single subject, repeated 31 times in a row.
The way I want to approach August is different from how I've written the other months. Because every day is already organized around a specific star, I don't need to call out individual films as urgently - the day itself is the recommendation. Instead I want to tell you which days are worth restructuring your schedule for, which are pleasant background viewing, which contain genuine surprises, and which landmark films you should under no circumstances sleep through. Some days get two sentences. Some get a paragraph. The essential ones get the full treatment.
Let's go.
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Friday, August 1st - Lana Turner. Imitation of Life (1959) at 8pm is the anchor, and it's one of the most devastating films Sirk ever made - the racial passing narrative, the maternal sacrifice, the final scene that earns everything leading up to it. The Bad and the Beautiful (1952) at 10:15 is the Minnelli companion piece, Turner as a movie star being used and discarded by an ambitious producer, and it's one of the better films about what Hollywood does to the people it manufactures. The Postman Always Rings Twice (1946) runs at 6pm if you want the full day, and the prime-time sequence of those three films together is about as strong an evening as Turner's filmography can offer.
Saturday, August 2nd - Christopher Plummer. The Sound of Music (1965) at 8pm is the obvious draw and there's nothing wrong with that. What I'd flag is The Man Who Would Be King (1975) at 1am - John Huston, Connery, Caine, Kipling, and one of the great male-friendship films of the 1970s, and Plummer's brief role is barely in it, which makes his day an interesting case of a star being honored partly through films that aren't really about him.
Sunday, August 3rd - Audrey Hepburn. This is the day I'd turn on at noon and leave running. Sabrina (1954), Charade (1963), Two for the Road (1967), Wait Until Dark (1967), Breakfast at Tiffany's (1961), My Fair Lady (1964) - the range across this single day is remarkable because Hepburn was genuinely doing different things in each of them. Wait Until Dark at 6pm is the one that always surprises people who think they know her range - a blind woman alone in her apartment, a genuinely tense thriller, and a performance of physical vulnerability and interior resourcefulness that has nothing to do with the gamine charm she's usually remembered for. Two for the Road at 4pm is the Donen film that gets overlooked between the bigger titles, and it's actually the most emotionally sophisticated thing she made - a marriage assembled out of fragments, running backward and forward in time. The late-night slot gives you My Fair Lady at 12:30am, which is long and gorgeous and worth staying up for.
Monday, August 4th - Howard Keel. A full day of MGM musicals at their most extravagant. Seven Brides for Seven Brothers (1954) at 8pm, Show Boat (1951) at 10pm, Annie Get Your Gun (1950) at 6pm. If you like these films - and I do, in the specific way you like things that are completely confident about what they are - this is a tremendous Monday. If you're more ambivalent about the form, you can use this day to catch up on sleep before the week really starts.
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Tuesday, August 5th - Claude Rains.
This is one of the five or six days in the entire month I'd call essential, and I want to explain why before I just list the films.
Rains is one of those actors whose greatness operates almost entirely through the gap between what his face says and what his character claims to feel. He is never quite what he appears to be - not a villain, not a hero, not quite trustworthy, not quite dishonest - and that quality, which would be a weakness in a less subtle performer, becomes under his control the source of almost infinite interest. You watch him differently than you watch most actors. You watch the space between his lines.
Notorious (1946) at 8pm is the film where this is most devastating. Alexander Sebastian loves Ingrid Bergman - genuinely, helplessly, in a way that his Nazi colleagues and his domineering mother treat as weakness - and Rains plays that love as something completely sincere and completely doomed, simultaneous with his villainy and inseparable from it. It is one of the saddest performances in any Hitchcock film and I'd argue it's Rains at the absolute peak of what he could do.
Then Casablanca (1942) at 10pm. I know. You've seen it. See it again. Captain Renault is among the great comic performances in Hollywood cinema and it's in a film so canonically serious that people sometimes forget how funny it is, or rather how much the film earns its gravity through the comedy that precedes it. Rains and Bogart together is the screen relationship that makes the film work in ways that the romance, beautiful as it is, couldn't sustain alone.
Now, Voyager (1942) at 6pm and Mr. Skeffington (1944) at 3:30pm round out the prime-time buildup. If you're doing the full day, start at 6pm. If you're doing the essential minimum, turn on at 8 and don't leave until Casablanca ends.
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Wednesday, August 6th - Judy Garland.
The other essential day of the first week, and the one I want to spend the most time on.
The Judy Garland day is structured as a career chronology, running from the child performer films of the early 40s through the MGM years and into the final chapter, and it reads - whether intentionally or not - as a document of what stardom costs when the machinery of Hollywood decides your feelings are a production resource. The early films are bright and often wonderful. A Star is Born (1954) at 8pm is the rupture.
Cukor's film runs in its restored version at nearly three hours, and it is about a woman with an extraordinary talent whose career is built on the ruins of someone else's, and the whole film knows that the story it's telling has happened and will keep happening. James Mason's Norman Maine is the star falling; Garland's Esther Blodgett is the star rising; and the film refuses to let either of their trajectories feel simple or clean. Garland's "The Man That Got Away" is the most famous sequence in the film and it deserves to be, but the scene I keep returning to is "The Born in a Trunk" number - fifteen minutes of musical autobiography that feels like Garland looking directly at the camera and saying: this is what happened to me.
I Could Go On Singing (1963) at 11:15pm is her last film, and I want to be direct about what that means to watch. It's not a great film. It doesn't need to be. Garland plays a concert performer who reconnects with an estranged son she gave up years earlier, and the film gives her one scene - a backstage breakdown before a performance - that is so nakedly personal that it barely functions as acting. She's 40 and she looks older and she has about four years left and she knows more about what the film is about than any of the other actors in it. Watching A Star is Born and then I Could Go On Singing in the same night is as close as the cinema gets to a life told in two chapters.
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Thursday, August 7th - Ruby Dee.
This is the day I flagged at the end of the July preview and I want to make good on that flag. Ruby Dee's day runs from The Tall Target (1951) and Edge of the City (1957) through the afternoon and into an evening that gives you A Raisin in the Sun (1961) at 8pm and Uptight (1968) at 10:15pm.
A Raisin in the Sun is the Lorraine Hansberry play filmed with most of the original Broadway cast - Sidney Poitier, Dee, Claudia McNeil - and it remains one of the most uncompromising American family dramas ever filmed. Every person in the Younger family is right about something and wrong about something and the film doesn't arbitrate between them; it just watches what happens when people under that kind of economic and social pressure try to love each other. Dee is the emotional center even when Poitier is the narrative one, and watching her track the quiet cost of every scene around her is a tutorial in what screen acting can accomplish in the margins of a bigger performance.
Uptight (1968) is the Jules Dassin film almost nobody knows - a remake of The Informer set in the Black Power movement immediately after Martin Luther King Jr.'s assassination, with Dee and Julian Mayfield. It was made inside the grief of that moment and it carries that grief. If you're watching the whole day, the movement from the 1961 film to the 1968 film charts exactly what those seven years meant, and that makes the double feature one of the most historically resonant pairings in the whole month.
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Friday, August 8th - James Garner. The two Support Your Local films at 8pm and 10pm are the right place to start if you want to understand what Garner was best at - a western comedy where the joke is that his character is not brave and doesn't want to be, and keeps finding himself the hero anyway through luck and charm and the careful avoidance of any situation requiring genuine heroism. He plays this better than anyone. The Americanization of Emily (1964) at 3pm is the film I'd add for depth, a Paddy Chayefsky screenplay in which Garner's character is a coward who makes the moral argument for cowardice with complete sincerity, and the film takes him seriously rather than punishing him for it.
Saturday, August 9th - Elizabeth Taylor. Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1958) at 3pm and The Taming of the Shrew (1967) at 8pm are the prime-time entries, but the day works best as an arc from the child star films in the morning through to the Burton collaborations at night, because Taylor's career is one of the few in Hollywood where you can trace the development of a genuine actress from inside a system that mainly wanted a beautiful face. The Taming of the Shrew is pure pleasure - two people who are genuinely married doing Shakespeare together and bringing their real dynamic to every scene.
Sunday, August 10th - Clark Gable. The day is dominated by the Torchy Blane series in the afternoon, but the prime-time sequence is strong: Teacher's Pet (1958) at 8pm, The Misfits (1961) at 10:15. The Misfits is Gable's last film - and Monroe's - and Huston directing both of them and Montgomery Clift in a Nevada desert, and there is something almost unbearable about watching it knowing what was coming for all of them. Gable died of a heart attack eleven days after shooting wrapped. It's not a great film and it's one of the most important films of that era and those aren't contradictions.
Monday, August 11th - Glenda Farrell. This is a day for pre-Code enthusiasts. The Torchy Blane series runs from late morning through dinner, and Farrell's fast-talking reporter is an archetype that Hollywood would spend the next decade diluting. I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang (1932) at 10:45pm is the serious film of the evening - LeRoy's prison expose, Paul Muni, one of the most socially radical films the early sound era produced.
Tuesday, August 12th - Pedro Armendáriz. This is the day I find most interesting for what it says about TCM's curatorial ambitions. Armendáriz was one of the great Mexican actors, an international star in Golden Age Mexican cinema who crossed over into Hollywood supporting roles, and a day dedicated to him is an act of genuine recovery - most of his best work is in the Mexican films (Emilio Fernández's María Candelaria, Enamorada) rather than the Hollywood pictures on this schedule. Fort Apache (1948) at 8am is Ford, and Armendáriz's role there is substantial. 3 Godfathers (1949) at 10pm gives him the prime-time slot alongside Wayne. But if you want to understand who he actually was as a performer, you need the Mexican films, and the fact that TCM is surfacing him at all is worth noting.
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Wednesday, August 13th - Shirley MacLaine. Terms of Endearment (1983) at 8pm and Sweet Charity (1969) at 10:30 are the prime-time entries. MacLaine is one of those performers whose best work exists in a register of controlled vulnerability - she's funny in a way that always has some sadness underneath it and sad in a way that always has some comedy underneath it, and that quality makes her perfect for both of these films. Being There (1979) at 11:30am is the curio of the day - her role is small but the film is one of the strangest and most melancholy things Peter Sellers ever made. Some Came Running (1958) runs at 3:30am for the very dedicated, and it's the Minnelli film that earns her Oscar nomination, and it's a film that doesn't get its due.
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Thursday, August 14th - Sterling Hayden.
This is the day I've been waiting for since I first looked at the August schedule.
The Asphalt Jungle (1950) at 6pm, The Killing (1956) at 8pm, Crime Wave (1953) at 9:45pm, Dr. Strangelove (1964) at 12:45am.
Sterling Hayden is one of the great what-ifs of classical Hollywood - a man who was genuinely beautiful and physically imposing and had the kind of face a camera loved, who spent most of his career believing he was a fake, a real seaman and adventurer who had stumbled into movies by accident and never quite got over the embarrassment. The self-contempt is in the performances. It gives his best work an undertow of self-destruction that makes him perfect for noir.
The Asphalt Jungle is Huston's heist film and Hayden's Dix Handley is a man who steals because he wants to go back to the Kentucky farm he grew up on, which is a dream so specific and so hopeless that it breaks the film open. Hayden plays the yearning with no irony whatsoever, which is the only way the character works. The Killing at 8pm I've written about elsewhere: Kubrick, perfect clockwork, failure engineered to the last detail. Then Dr. Strangelove at 12:45 gives you Hayden as General Jack D. Ripper, one of the great performances of American paranoia, a man who has decided that fluoridation is a Communist plot to contaminate his precious bodily fluids and who starts a nuclear war over it. It is a character of pure delusion played with absolute conviction, and the fact that the same man who gave you Dix Handley's heartbreaking sincerity could give you this is one of the stranger gifts in this career.
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Friday, August 15th - Janet Leigh. Psycho (1960) at 8pm and Touch of Evil (1958) at 10pm. The two great Leigh films, and both are films about the violation of women's bodies and the systems that enable it. Psycho is Hitchcock and Marion Crane and the shower and you know all of this; what I'd add is that Leigh's performance in the first half of the film - the theft, the guilt, the drive - is an entirely complete character study that the shower interrupts rather than concludes, which is the point. Touch of Evil is Welles filming Leigh in a way that makes the camera itself seem predatory. These are two of the greatest films of their decade and they happen to star the same person and they happen to be consecutive tonight.
Saturday, August 16th - Charles Bronson. A day of action films, more or less. Hard Times (1975) at 8pm is the Walter Hill film and the most interesting entry - Bronson as a bare-knuckle fighter during the Depression, minimal dialogue, a film that is almost entirely about physicality and presence. The Great Escape (1963) runs in the afternoon and is the film most people associate with him, where he's actually in an ensemble. Death Wish (1974) at midnight is what it is, which is a film that made a particular argument at a particular moment and made it very efficiently.
Sunday, August 17th - Jennifer Jones. Cluny Brown (1946) at 8pm is the film I'd recommend most heartily to people who think they know Jones mainly from the heavy dramatic work - Lubitsch directing her as a plumber's niece trying to find her place in English society, and she's genuinely funny in it, loose and comic in ways that Song of Bernadette (1943) at 10pm absolutely doesn't allow. The contrast on a single day between the woman Lubitsch saw and the woman Selznick built is one of the more instructive things the August schedule quietly offers.
Monday, August 18th - James Gleason. This is one of the days where Summer Under the Stars does its most important cultural work. Gleason was a ubiquitous character actor - in hundreds of films, recognizable everywhere, famous to nobody - and a day devoted to him is TCM saying that supporting performances also constitute careers worth remembering. Here Comes Mr. Jordan (1941) at 8pm gives him a substantial role. The Night of the Hunter (1955) at 10pm is included because he's in it, and watching it again in this context - as a Gleason film rather than a Laughton film - is an interesting exercise in how much of the texture of a film lives in its peripheral performers.
Tuesday, August 19th - Hedy Lamarr. Algiers (1938) at 10pm is the film that made her an American star, the first film she made in Hollywood after MGM bought her contract, and it's a romantic thriller that works almost entirely on the force of her presence in front of a camera. What rarely gets mentioned alongside her film career is that she co-invented, with composer George Antheil, the frequency-hopping spread spectrum communication system that became the basis for Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, and GPS. No other actor in the Summer Under the Stars schedule co-invented the technological foundation of the modern internet. I think about this a lot.
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Wednesday, August 20th - James Cagney.
I have an opinion about James Cagney that I'll put here: he is the most purely kinetic performer in the history of American film, and I mean that as the highest possible compliment. Cagney thought and felt through his body in a way that the camera captured as a kind of electrical current - you can see him thinking in his feet. He is never still. Even when he's standing still he's not still.
Love Me or Leave Me (1955) at 8pm is the prime-time anchor, the Ruth Etting biopic, Cagney as a gangster who manages and controls and ultimately destroys a singer he loves, and the ambivalence with which the film treats him - never excusing the abuse but also never reducing him to simple villainy - makes it one of the more mature examinations of that dynamic the 1950s produced. Doris Day opposite him is extraordinary in ways that surprised everybody, including apparently Doris Day.
The Mayor of Hell (1933) at 10:15pm and City for Conquest (1940) at midnight run deeper into the evening, and the 1933 film in particular is early Cagney in the pre-Code mode - a racketeer put in charge of a reformatory, using criminal logic to actually help the kids in it, which is the kind of narrative that only worked before the Hays Code arrived to insist that criminals be punished. The progression from the pre-Code films to the later work across a single day is one of the better educations in what the Production Code actually changed about American cinema.
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Thursday, August 21st - Patricia Neal.
The essential day of the third week.
The Fountainhead (1949) at 8pm and Hud (1963) at 10pm are the prime-time sequence, and both films give Neal roles that require her to play women caught inside a man's self-mythology and forced to decide what to do with that knowledge. In The Fountainhead she chooses the myth and pays for it; in Hud she refuses it and pays for it differently. Watching them together makes her the constant and the films the variables, which is a genuinely interesting way to watch acting.
Hud is the film I'd argue hardest for here. Paul Newman is Hud, the most completely selfish man in the Texas Panhandle, and Neal's Alma is the housekeeper who watches him with perfect clarity about what he is and what he'll do, and the film gives her one scene - an attempted rape, brutal and matter-of-fact - and then shows you a woman getting up the next morning and deciding to leave. Not screaming, not falling apart. Just leaving. Her Oscar was entirely deserved.
A Face in the Crowd (1957) runs at midnight for the very dedicated, and the TCM programmer who put Elia Kazan's media-manipulation film after the Hud late show understood something - Neal was in both of them, playing versions of the same character: the woman who sees clearly and can't make what she sees matter.
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Friday, August 22nd - Frank Sinatra. Guys and Dolls (1955) at 8pm, The Man with the Golden Arm (1955) at 10:45pm. The same year, opposite registers - one is Sinatra coasting on charisma in a big Technicolor musical, one is Sinatra stripping it down to the desperation of a jazz musician trying to kick heroin. Both are worth watching, and seeing them on the same day demonstrates something about what he could do when he chose to and what he did when he didn't.
Saturday, August 23rd - Gina Lollobrigida. The summer European star day. Come September (1961) at 8pm, Trapeze (1956) at 4pm. These are films that exist primarily to justify pointing a camera at her, and they succeed completely on those terms. Beat the Devil (1953) at 11:45am is the Huston/Truffaut curio - Bogart, Lollobrigida, Peter Lorre, Robert Morley, and a script that Capote wrote in nightly installments, a film that is either brilliant or nonsense depending on the day and possibly both.
Sunday, August 24th - Henry Fonda. Fail-Safe (1964) at 8pm, The Best Man (1964) at 10pm - two films from the same year, both about American political institutions and whether the men inside them can hold when the stakes become unbearable. The Best Man is the less-seen of the two and the more interesting as political satire, Gore Vidal's play about two presidential candidates destroying each other, with Fonda playing the man who wins by losing. Mister Roberts (1955) at midnight is the warm late entry, and The Wrong Man (1956) at 6pm is Hitchcock and Fonda playing a real person wrongly accused of robbery, one of the most formally austere films Hitchcock made and therefore one of the least discussed.
Monday, August 25th - Shirley Jones. Carousel (1956) at 8pm and The Music Man (1962) at 10:15 are the Rogers and Hammerstein anchor. Jones won her Oscar for Elmer Gantry (1960), which runs at 1am, and it's a fascinating case of an actress known primarily for wholesome musicals taking a supporting role as a prostitute and winning the Academy Award partly through the surprise of her being cast against type. The two identities - musical theater sweetness and Elmer Gantry - both appear on this day.
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Tuesday, August 26th - Tom Courtenay.
This is the day for anyone who's been waiting for TCM to do something serious with the British New Wave, and they've buried it on a Tuesday in August, which is very TCM.
Doctor Zhivago (1965) at 4:30pm is the big-budget anchor, and Courtenay's Strelnikov is one of the great supporting performances in the film - a man who has turned himself into a political abstraction as protection against grief. Billy Liar (1963) at 8pm is the essential entry: John Schlesinger directing Courtenay as a young man in Bradford who lives almost entirely inside his fantasy life and is given, in Julie Christie, the one real alternative to it. The final scene is one of the best-observed moments about the difference between people who leave and people who stay. The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner (1962) at 10pm is Tony Richardson, and the relationship between that film and the British class system is about as confrontational as a mainstream film of that era was willing to be. The Dresser (1983) at midnight gives you late Courtenay opposite Albert Finney, both doing theatrical fireworks in a backstage drama. This day is the one I'd recommend to anyone who thinks they don't know Courtenay's work. You know Zhivago. You probably don't know the rest. Fix that.
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Wednesday, August 27th - Joan Crawford. Torch Song (1953) at 8pm, Harriet Craig (1950) at 11:45pm, Humoresque (1946) at 1:30am, Possessed (1947) at 3:45am. The late-night sequence - three films in a row from the late 40s and early 50s - is the real Crawford, the one who survived the MGM star-making machine and came out the other side as a character actress doing things that young Hollywood wouldn't touch. Possessed at 3:45am is a film about a woman's psychological breakdown, told in flashback while she's being treated, and Crawford plays it with a commitment to unglamour that is startling even now. And Singin' in the Rain (1952) at 8pm is Donald O'Connor's film, not Crawford's, but it was made in the same year and the contrast between what MGM was doing with him on August 28th and what they were doing with her is a whole story about the studio system that requires no narration.
Thursday, August 28th - Donald O'Connor. Singin' in the Rain (1952) at 8pm. "Make 'Em Laugh" is one of the most physically extraordinary pieces of comic performance ever captured on film, and O'Connor does it in a single take. He suffered a minor breakdown after filming it from the physical exertion. Gene Kelly and Debbie Reynolds are the leads of the movie. Donald O'Connor steals it with one sequence and then has the grace to give it back.
Friday, August 29th - Alexis Smith. A day of 1940s Warner Bros. melodrama, and Conflict (1945) at 10pm is the interesting entry - Humphrey Bogart murdering his wife to be with her younger sister, and Smith as the younger sister, an object of obsession around whom the film rotates without giving her much agency. The day is most interesting as a document of what the studio system did with beautiful actresses who weren't quite stars.
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Saturday, August 30th - Kirk Douglas.
The penultimate day of Summer Under the Stars and one of the best.
Out of the Past (1947) at 6am opens the day if you're among the truly committed, and it's one of the great noirs - Jacques Tourneur, Robert Mitchum in the lead, Douglas as the villain, and a flashback structure that is almost unbearably fatalistic. Paths of Glory (1957) at 2pm is Kubrick, Douglas as a World War I colonel trying to prevent the military execution of three innocent soldiers for cowardice, and it is one of the most controlled and most furious indictments of institutional inhumanity the cinema produced in the 1950s. The final scene has no speech and no resolution and it tells you everything.
Detective Story (1951) at 8pm is Wyler directing Douglas as a detective whose ferocious moral rigidity masks something he can't face about himself - a film that takes place in a single police precinct in a single day and contains more compacted drama than most films three times its length. Ace in the Hole (1951) at 10pm is Billy Wilder at his most scathing, Douglas as a cynical journalist who orchestrates a media circus around a trapped miner while the miner slowly dies. It was considered too mean-spirited at the time of its release and was a commercial failure. It has aged into one of the most prescient films ever made about American media. These two films at 8pm and 10pm, back to back, on a single Saturday night, are the highlight of the final week.
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Sunday, August 31st - Irene Dunne.
The month ends quietly, which is right. After Kirk Douglas, after Crawford, after Hayden and Cagney and Garland, the final day gives you Irene Dunne - an actress whose particular gift was for warmth that never softened into sentimentality, comedy that never felt cruel, and dramatic performances that never lost their sense of proportion. The Awful Truth (1937) at noon, My Favorite Wife (1940) at 8pm, I Remember Mama (1948) at 9:45pm. Love Affair (1939) at 2:15am - the original, before the Cary Grant remake - is a film that Dunne co-carries with Charles Boyer, and it's the one I'd stay up for. Theodora Goes Wild (1936) at 2pm is the screwball entry, the one that shows you the comic range that the dramatic films sometimes obscure.
Summer ends with Love Affair at 2 in the morning on a Sunday in August. That feels about right.
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August 2025: The Superlatives
The Day You Can't Miss: Sterling Hayden, August 14. The Asphalt Jungle, The Killing, Dr. Strangelove in sequence. One of the most extraordinary single-day lineups in the whole month.
The Night of the Month: Judy Garland, August 6 - A Star is Born at 8pm, I Could Go On Singing at 11:15. As close as cinema gets to a life told in two chapters.
The Performance Worth Your Time: Janet Leigh in Touch of Evil (August 15, 10pm). Welles pointing a camera at her like an act of menace. It still works.
The Hidden Treasure: Tom Courtenay, August 26. Billy Liar, The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner, The Dresser - a complete argument for a career that deserves a much larger American reputation.
The Discovery of the Month: Hud on Patricia Neal day (August 21, 10pm). Her Oscar performance, and the scene after the attempted rape is the best thing she ever did.
The Pairing That Deepens Both Films: The Asphalt Jungle and The Killing on Sterling Hayden day. Two Hayden heist films, made six years apart, the first by Huston and the second by Kubrick, and watching them together tells you something about what changed in American crime cinema in that interval.
The Day Worth Starting Early: Audrey Hepburn, August 3. Turn it on at noon and don't turn it off.
The Most Important Day Nobody Will Talk About: Ruby Dee, August 7. A Raisin in the Sun at 8, Uptight at 10:15, and a full day of films that document a specific American experience across two decades with clarity and grief.
The Late Night Worth Losing Sleep For: Claude Rains, August 5 - Notorious at 8pm, Casablanca at 10pm. Start at 8. Don't move.
The Performer August Most Surprisingly Reveals: Pedro Armendáriz, August 12. The Hollywood pictures don't show you who he really was. This day is a starting point. The Mexican films are the destination.
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August is the month that reminds you what this whole enterprise is for. Not theses, not spotlights, not curricular structure - just the accumulated weight of a career, laid out in a day, trusting you to see it. Thirty-one careers in thirty-one days. Some of them you already know. Some of them you only think you know. Some of them, like Glenda Farrell and Pedro Armendáriz and James Gleason, exist in the schedule primarily to make the argument that the history of cinema is much larger than the canon you've been handed, and that TCM has been quietly trying to expand that canon for as long as it's been on the air.
Turn it on. Leave it on. See what shows up at 3am.
