TCM Monthly Preview: July 2025
July is a summer month in the truest TCM sense - which means it’s looser, more playful, and occasionally more surprising than the months that surround it. There’s no single Spotlight series with a sustained argument running through the whole month the way May had. What July has instead is a Mythology Movies Spotlight on Wednesdays, an ‘80s Ladies Star of the Month on Tuesdays, a guest programmer night that drops two of the greatest films ever made in the same evening, a full David Lynch tribute, and a closing night devoted to Francis Ford Coppola that I’m really looking forward to. It also has a Farley Granger birthday tribute, a Fitzgerald centennial, Shark Week (yes, really), and one Friday that pairs Cleopatra with Suddenly, Last Summer in a Mankiewicz double feature that makes a surprising amount of sense. The month ends with a preview of TCM’s Summer Under the Stars in August, which I’ll touch on at the bottom. July doesn’t have a thesis. But it has energy, and for a summer month that’s sometimes the better choice.
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Tuesday, July 1st is the Farley Granger 100th birthday tribute, running Strangers on a Train (1951) at 8pm, Side Street (1950) at 10pm, and They Live By Night (1948) at 1:15am. Hitchcock is the obvious draw, and Strangers on a Train deserves every word of praise it gets - Robert Walker’s Bruno Anthony is one of the most unsettling presences in any Hitchcock film, a man so thoroughly charming about murder that you almost understand how Granger’s Guy gets entangled with him. But They Live By Night at the late hour is the one I want to flag. Nicholas Ray’s debut, a young lovers-on-the-run picture that is not the tough crime film it sounds like but something much more tender and much sadder - two kids who never had a chance, filmed with a sympathy that Ray would carry through his entire career. It’s where his cinema begins and it’s extraordinary.
Wednesday, July 2nd spotlights Warren William across a string of pre-Code programmers. William was one of those actors who was everywhere in early sound Hollywood and has largely vanished from the cultural memory, and a night like this is exactly what TCM does well - not just showing classics but recovering careers. Employee’s Entrance (1933) at 12:30am is the standout, William playing a department store tyrant who would have made Gordon Gekko nervous. Pre-Code Hollywood gave men like William permission to be genuinely monstrous in ways the Hays Code would soon prohibit, and the films are bracing for it.
Thursday, July 3rd marks the 100th anniversary of The Great Gatsby with the 1974 adaptation at 8pm and Elia Kazan’s The Last Tycoon (1976) at 10:30. The Gatsby is Clayburgh and Redford and Robert Merrill’s production design, and whatever its narrative shortcomings, it looks extraordinary. The Last Tycoon is the more underrated film - Kazan’s last feature, Fitzgerald’s unfinished Hollywood novel, Robert De Niro in a controlled, interior performance that belongs in more conversations about his 1970s work than it gets. Harold Pinter wrote the screenplay. It’s cool and strange and worth your time.
Friday, July 4th is Independence Day programming: Yankee Doodle Dandy (1942) at 8pm and 1776 (1972) at 10:30. Yankee Doodle Dandy is James Cagney at the height of his physical gifts, a performance of such kinetic joy that even the most reflexive cynicism tends to dissolve somewhere around the third musical number. And 1776 - the musical about the signing of the Declaration of Independence - is more sardonic and more interesting than its premise suggests. The founding fathers are petty, self-interested, and funny, which is the only honest way to dramatize them. Drums Along the Mohawk (1939) runs at 1:30am, Ford and Fonda and Claudette Colbert on the frontier. A good overnight choice.
Saturday, July 5th has the Joe Dante Two for One: The Night of the Hunter (1955) and The Fool Killer (1965). The Night of the Hunter is Charles Laughton’s only film as director, Robert Mitchum as a psychopathic preacher with LOVE and HATE tattooed on his knuckles, Lillian Gish with a shotgun, and some of the most visually striking imagery in American sound cinema. It’s a fairy tale about evil and the protection of childhood and it is genuinely frightening in a way that horror films four times its budget rarely manage. If you haven’t seen it, July 5th is your night. The Fool Killer is a nearly-forgotten oddity - a Southern Gothic with Edward Albert as a Civil War orphan - and a good companion piece in the “dark Americana” tradition. Noir Alley gives us This Side of the Law (1950), a tidy little case-of-mistaken-identity thriller.
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Sunday, July 6th is the Monty Python double feature - Holy Grail (1975) and Life of Brian (1979) - which is a completely different register from the rest of July’s programming and a welcome one. These are films I’ve seen so many times that I’ve basically internalized them as ambient knowledge, but watching them on TCM in the context of a summer Sunday feels correct. The TCM Imports are something else entirely: Onibaba (1964) and Black Cat (1968), both directed by Kaneto Shindo, both set in feudal Japan, both about women surviving by killing, and both among the most beautifully shot films in the Japanese catalog. The programming logic of following two Python comedies with Shindo’s feudal horror films at 2am is either a mistake or genius, and I choose to believe the latter.
Monday, July 7th is the guest programmer night with Michael Chow, and what he’s programmed is Lawrence of Arabia (1962) at 8pm and Seven Samurai (1954) at midnight. That’s it. Two of the greatest films ever made, back to back, starting at 8pm on a Monday. I don’t have much to add. Lawrence is David Lean and Peter O’Toole and Omar Sharif and the desert and one of the most formally astonishing things the cinema has produced. Seven Samurai is Kurosawa’s masterpiece, a film that invented the template for half the action cinema of the last 70 years while also being more emotionally complex than any of the films it influenced. Yojimbo (1961) runs at 3:45am as a bonus. This is a Monday I’m planning around.
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Tuesday, July 8th opens the ‘80s Ladies Star of the Month with Romancing the Stone (1984), 9 to 5 (1980), and Working Girl (1988). The framing - spotlighting a different actress each week - gives the recurring theme more specificity than the average Star of the Month, and this first night is a real one. 9 to 5 at 10pm is Jane Fonda, Lily Tomlin, and Dolly Parton getting revenge on a nightmare boss, and it holds up considerably better than most workplace comedies of its era because all three performances are so committed and so distinct. It’s genuinely funny, which is the thing that tends to get lost in conversations about its cultural politics. Working Girl at midnight is Nichols directing Melanie Griffith in a film that is also about workplace power and considerably more ambivalent about what winning looks like.
Wednesday, July 9th opens the Mythology Movies Spotlight: Clash of the Titans (1981) at 8pm and Jason and the Argonauts (1963) at 10:15. The Spotlight’s value depends on what you’re looking for. If you want good films, the later Spotlight nights (the Pasolini nights in particular) are where the quality is. If you want to watch Ray Harryhausen’s stop-motion skeleton army fight Jason of Iolcus, then Jason and the Argonauts will give you that and it will be wonderful. The skeleton fight is still one of the most remarkable pieces of practical effects work ever put on film. Harryhausen animated each skeleton one frame at a time, and the joy you feel watching it is the joy of craftsmanship that has no alibi other than the desire to do the thing as well as it can be done.
Thursday, July 10th is the Christopher Reeve spotlight, anchored by Superman (1978) at 8pm. The case for Superman as genuinely great filmmaking rather than just nostalgic comfort tends to get ignored, but it deserves making. Richard Donner directing a film that commits absolutely to its premise - that a man from another planet could become the embodiment of a certain American ideal - and Reeve making that commitment the entire moral core of his performance. He makes you believe a man can fly because he believes it himself, and that turns out to be enough. Somewhere in Time (1980) follows, which is a different kind of Reeve vehicle - romantic, melancholy, and completely unashamed about being both.
Friday, July 11th is the David Lynch tribute. The Straight Story (1999) at 8pm, Blue Velvet (1986) at 10pm, Wild at Heart (1990) at 12:15am, Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me (1992) at 2:30am, Eraserhead (1977) at 4:45am.
The programmatic wisdom here is in the order. Starting with The Straight Story - Lynch’s Disney film, his gentlest and most radiantly straightforward work, an old man driving a lawnmower across Iowa to visit his ailing brother - is the move that makes everything after it more powerful. You see the full range of what Lynch was capable of before the darkness begins. Then Blue Velvet arrives and you’re inside a film that uses the surfaces of American normality as a mask for something violent and strange and the contrast with The Straight Story makes it land harder. Fire Walk with Me at 2:30am is the Lynch film most people still haven’t reckoned with properly - a prequel to Twin Peaks that explains the worst thing that happens in the series and is, in doing so, one of the most genuinely harrowing things he ever made. And then Eraserhead at 4:45am, the beginning, the industrial nightmare of early sound and industrial imagery and a baby that I won’t describe here. This is a night I’d dedicate an entire Friday to.
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Saturday, July 12th runs the Debra Winger Two for One: People Will Talk (1951) and The Scarlet Empress (1934). Neither film features Winger, which puts this squarely in the category of “Two for One as programming excuse,” but it’s a good excuse. The Scarlet Empress is Von Sternberg and Marlene Dietrich, Catherine the Great, and one of the most visually excessive films of the entire classical period. Noir Alley gives us The Gangster (1947), Barry Sullivan as a small-time racketeer watching his operation collapse in slow motion, which is a more interior and more unusual noir than the slot usually provides.
Sunday, July 13th runs Cold War Chills with Fail-Safe (1964) at 8pm and The Bedford Incident (1965) at 10pm. These are the two films that Sidney Lumet and Richard Widmark made in the shadow of Dr. Strangelove, and while neither is as brilliant as Kubrick’s film, they’re making a different argument about the same material - Kubrick’s version says the whole system is absurd; Fail-Safe says the system is rational and that’s the terrifying part. A single mechanical failure leading to a nuclear strike through the operation of correct procedure. Henry Fonda as the President, Walter Matthau playing against type as a hawkish strategist. It’s quietly one of Lumet’s best films. The TCM Imports give you Zéro de Conduite (1933) and Truffaut’s The 400 Blows (1959) back to back - two French films about boys in rebellion against institutional authority, separated by 26 years, the second one directly inspired by the first. The 400 Blows at 3am on a Sunday is a gift.
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Tuesday, July 15th is the second ‘80s Ladies night, with Michelle Pfeiffer in The Fabulous Baker Boys (1989) opening at 8pm. Pfeiffer sliding across a piano in a red dress is the image most people have of this film, and that scene earns its iconicity, but what I’d argue is underrated about the film is how specifically it’s about two brothers who have been professionally codependent for so long that the arrival of a third person - a woman with her own agenda and her own talent - exposes the dynamic for what it actually is. It’s a film about creativity and failure and sibling relationships, and the piano scene is the moment those themes finally combust. Fatal Attraction (1987) runs at 12:15am - Glenn Close doing something more complicated than the film’s reputation would suggest, which is usually the case when you revisit it.
Wednesday, July 16th is the Mythology Spotlight’s best night so far: Helen of Troy (1956) and Ulysses (1954). These are the Italian sword-and-sandal productions, which have their pleasures, but the reason to stay up is the Spotlight’s implied trajectory - these commercial epics are setting up the Pasolini nights later in the month, and understanding what the mass-market mythology film looked like makes what Pasolini did to the same material feel more radical.
Thursday, July 17th spotlights William Dieterle, a director whose career deserves more attention than it gets. The Devil and Daniel Webster (1941) at 8pm is the essential entry - a genuine American folk tale, Edward Arnold as a New Hampshire farmer who sells his soul and gets Daniel Webster to argue his case before a jury of the damned. It’s one of those classical Hollywood films that achieves something genuinely mythological, and if you’ve never seen it, this is the night.
Friday, July 18th is Cleopatra (1963) from 8pm to 12:30am, and I’ll be honest that four and a half hours of the most expensive film ever made at that point is a commitment I’m genuinely prepared to make. The production story alone - Fox nearly going bankrupt, Burton and Taylor falling into one of the most public love affairs in Hollywood history, Mankiewicz firing and rehiring himself - is one of cinema’s great disaster narratives, and the film that resulted is somehow even better than its reputation. Then Suddenly, Last Summer (1959) at 12:30am puts Mankiewicz in a completely different register - Tennessee Williams, Katharine Hepburn, Elizabeth Taylor, and a story about memory and violation and the violence of knowledge. The two-film Mankiewicz focus makes sense: director as author, working across wildly different scales and subjects but with a consistent preoccupation with people who talk too much and mean more than they say. Julius Caesar (1953) rounds out the overnight and features one of Brando’s stranger performances, which I mean as a compliment.
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Saturday, July 19th runs the Rosie Perez Two for One: Kubrick’s Killer's Kiss (1955) and The Harder They Fall (1956). Killer’s Kiss is early Kubrick, pre-The Killing, and watching it as a document of a filmmaker figuring out what he can do with a camera is genuinely interesting - the rooftop chase and the mannequin warehouse fight are already Kubrick. The Harder They Fall is Humphrey Bogart’s last film, a boxing corruption story, and knowing it’s his farewell gives the tired quality of his performance a weight that probably wasn’t fully intentional. Noir Alley gives us Intruder in the Dust (1949), Clarence Brown directing a film about a Black man in the South accused of murder and the lone white lawyer who believes him. Based on Faulkner. It’s a film that was decades ahead of where Hollywood usually was on race and it’s not discussed anywhere near enough.
Sunday, July 20th is Washington Stories with Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939) at 8pm. Capra and Stewart, the most earnest argument for civic idealism American cinema ever produced, and a film I find myself needing more than I expect to every time I watch it. The filibuster sequence should not work the way it works. It absolutely works. The TCM Imports close the night with the one-two of Vigo’s Zéro de Conduite (1933) and Truffaut’s The 400 Blows - wait, I see they’re on again from the Sunday the 13th. Two Sundays in a row of Truffaut at 3am. Hey, I have no complaints.
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Tuesday, July 22nd is the third ‘80s Ladies night, with Moonstruck (1987) at 8pm. Cher winning the Oscar for this is still one of the most fully earned acting awards of the decade - a performance of total commitment, playing a woman who decides at 37 to stop being practical about love, and the film honors that decision rather than punishing it. Mystic Pizza (1988) at 10pm is Julia Roberts before she was Julia Roberts, a film that holds up as a specific document of a specific time and place - three women in coastal Connecticut, their different relationships to work and ambition and men - with more substance than its romantic comedy framing suggests.
Wednesday, July 23rd is the Mythology Spotlight’s Pasolini night, and this is where the series becomes genuinely serious. Oedipus Rex (1967) at 8pm and Medea (1969) at 10pm. Pasolini treating Greek myth not as adventure or spectacle but as anthropological and psychological necessity - the stories exist because they contain truths about violence and desire and fate that more realistic narratives can’t hold. His Oedipus is shot in Morocco and features an anachronistic framing narrative; his Medea stars Maria Callas in her only film performance, and watching an opera singer embody a character whose tragedy is inseparable from her voice is one of those casting decisions that seems obvious in retrospect and could only have occurred to a filmmaker as laterally minded as Pasolini. Electra (1962) and Iphigenia (1977) run late into the night, both Greek films by Michael Cacoyannis, both worth catching if you’re in deep on the theme.
Thursday, July 24th has the Studio Saviors theme, programming Shirley Temple, Deanna Durbin, Rin Tin Tin, and - unexpectedly - Chinatown (1974) as examples of stars who saved studios from financial ruin. The logic is sound: Robert Evans rescued Paramount as a production executive and Chinatown is the apotheosis of that period. Seeing Chinatown at 11:30pm alongside a Shirley Temple film is the kind of accidental surrealism that makes TCM programming interesting. The overnight gives you The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948) at 3:30am, which is John Huston, Humphrey Bogart, and Walter Huston in one of the best films about greed and self-destruction American cinema produced. It’s one of those films where the ending lands so completely that the whole rest of the film retroactively reveals itself.
Friday, July 25th is the Joseph Ruttenberg cinematography night - Gaslight (1944) at 9:30pm is the film to watch here. George Cukor directing Charles Boyer and Ingrid Bergman in the film that gave us a word for a particular kind of psychological abuse, and Ruttenberg’s deep-shadowed photography of a Victorian townhouse that seems to shrink around its inhabitant is inseparable from what the film is doing. Boyer’s manipulation of Bergman is among the most chilling things the classical era produced, and Bergman’s performance of a woman losing her grip on her own reality is one of the greatest things she ever did.
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Saturday, July 26th brings the Robert Townsend Two for One: Here Comes Mr. Jordan (1941) and Network (1976). I love the audacity of this pairing. Here Comes Mr. Jordan is a warm, lightweight comedy about a boxer mistakenly taken to heaven who has to find a new body; Network is Sidney Lumet and Paddy Chayefsky’s scorched-earth satire of television, media, and American rage, one of the angriest and most prescient films ever made. The only thing these films have in common is that both involve Howard Beale. (The boxer in Mr. Jordan is named Joe Pendleton. I’m told Townsend just likes them both, which is a fine reason.) Noir Alley gives us Rififi (1955) - Jules Dassin’s French heist film, the twenty-minute jewel robbery conducted in near-total silence, one of the most purely technical sequences in the history of cinema. The Noir Alley slot rarely gets better than this.
Sunday, July 27th runs the Gregory Peck double feature: Cape Fear (1962) at 8pm and Gentleman’s Agreement (1947) at 10pm. Cape Fear is the one, and Robert Mitchum’s Max Cady is maybe the most purely menacing performance in all of American noir - a man who can legally do nothing wrong and uses that legality as a weapon against the people he wants to destroy. Peck’s uprightness makes the threat more rather than less disturbing because you understand what Cady is threatening to unmake. The TCM Imports close the night with Bertolucci’s La Commare Secca (1962) - his debut feature, not Pasolini but influenced by him - and Pasolini’s own Teorema (1968) at 4:15am, a film about a mysterious stranger who has sex with every member of a bourgeois Italian family and, in doing so, destroys them all. It’s one of the strangest films Pasolini made and that is saying something.
Monday, July 28th has the Disability in Film theme, anchored by Bad Day at Black Rock (1955) at 10pm. Spencer Tracy as a one-armed stranger arriving at a small Western town carrying a secret the residents will kill to protect. John Sturges directing a film that is essentially a Western in structure but set in the present, about complicity and shame and what small communities do to bury their crimes. Tracy’s one-armed judo takedown of Ernest Borgnine is one of the most cathartic moments in classical Hollywood cinema. Ship of Fools (1965) follows at 11:30 - Stanley Kramer’s all-star allegory about a ship crossing from Mexico to Germany in 1933, which is unwieldy in the way that Kramer’s social-conscience films often are but contains Simone Signoret doing something magnificent.
Tuesday, July 29th is the fourth ‘80s Ladies night and the strongest of the four. The Color Purple (1985) at 8pm - Spielberg adapting Alice Walker, with Whoopi Goldberg and Oprah Winfrey in performances of extraordinary force, and whatever arguments you’ve had about Spielberg’s stylistic choices here, the film matters and moves and the performances transcend any debate about the direction. Places in the Heart (1984) at 10:45pm is Sally Field’s film - a Texas widow in the Depression trying to keep her land, and Field’s performance is the kind that wins Oscars because it is genuinely the best performance of its year, quiet and accumulative and devastating by the end. Out of Africa follows at 12:45am if you want to stay in the prestige mode. I’d prefer to sleep.
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Wednesday, July 30th is the Mythology Spotlight’s best night: Down to Earth (1947) at 8pm as a warm-up, then Black Orpheus (1959) at 10pm. Marcel Camus transplanting the Orpheus and Eurydice myth to the Rio Carnival, shot in Technicolor with a bossa nova and samba score, and the film moves with a kind of overwhelming sensory beauty that makes the tragedy land all the harder for the surrounding joy. It won the Palme d’Or and the Oscar for Best Foreign Film and it deserved both. This is the Spotlight’s crown jewel, and if you’ve been following the mythology theme through the month - from the Harryhausen spectaculars through the Pasolini deconstructions - arriving at Black Orpheus feels like a reward.
Thursday, July 31st closes the month with the AFI Life Achievement Award tribute to Francis Ford Coppola. The award special at 8pm, then Apocalypse Now (1979) at 9:15, then Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker’s Apocalypse (1991) at 1:15am - Fax Bahr and George Hickenlooper’s documentary about the making of Apocalypse Now, which is one of the best behind-the-scenes documentaries ever made and, depending on your perspective, might be as great a film as Apocalypse Now itself. Watching the film and then immediately watching the document of how it almost destroyed everyone involved is a genuinely illuminating experience. The Rain People (1969) rounds out the night at 3:15 - early Coppola, a road film about a woman who leaves her husband to drive across the country without a destination, made before The Godfather changed everything. It’s more personal and more uncertain than his later work, which makes it quietly fascinating.
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A note on August: The last page of the schedule previews TCM Summer Under the Stars, which runs the first week of August with a different star honored every day - Lana Turner on the 1st, Christopher Plummer on the 2nd, Audrey Hepburn on the 3rd, Howard Keel on the 4th, Claude Rains on the 5th, Judy Garland on the 6th, Ruby Dee on the 7th, James Garner on the 8th. I’ll do a proper August preview when I have the full month, but I want to flag now: the Ruby Dee day on August 7th is the one that has my attention most. A Raisin in the Sun (1961) at 8pm, Uptight (1968) at 10:15, and a lineup that runs from The Tall Target (1951) in the early morning to The Court-Martial of Jackie Robinson late at night. That’s a day worth building your schedule around. And the Judy Garland day - A Star is Born (1954) at 8pm, I Could Go On Singing (1963) at 11:15 - is going to be a lot.
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July 2025: The Superlatives
The One You Can’t Miss: The Night of the Hunter (July 5, 8pm). Laughton’s only film. Mitchum’s most frightening performance. Still genuinely unlike anything else.
The Night of the Month: Friday, July 11. Lynch from 8pm to 6am. Start with The Straight Story and stay until Eraserhead.
The Monday Worth Planning Around: July 7. Lawrence of Arabia at 8pm, Seven Samurai at midnight. Michael Chow programmed two of the greatest films ever made on a summer Monday. I respect it.
The Hidden Treasure: Intruder in the Dust (Noir Alley, July 19, 12am). A film about race in the South that was ahead of its studio peers by a decade and is barely discussed now.
The Discovery of the Month: They Live By Night (July 1, 1:15am). Nicholas Ray’s debut. Watch it and understand where the restless sympathy of his whole career comes from.
The Double Feature That Works Best: Fail-Safe and The Bedford Incident (July 13). Two films that argue the Cold War was rational and terrifying for it. More unsettling together than either alone.
The One to Stay Up For: Black Orpheus (July 30, 10pm). The Mythology Spotlight has been building to this. The Orpheus myth in Technicolor at Carnival. Worth every prior night of the series.
The Pairing That Surprised Me: Here Comes Mr. Jordan and Network (July 26). Nothing in common except Robert Townsend liking them both. Works anyway.
The Performance Worth Your Time: Ingrid Bergman in Gaslight (July 25, 9:30pm). A woman losing her grip on her own reality, filmed in darkness. As good as she ever was.
The Thread Worth Following: The Mythology Spotlight on Wednesdays, particularly the back half - Pasolini on the 23rd, Black Orpheus on the 30th. The commercial peplum films at the start are setup. What Pasolini and Camus do with the same stories is the payoff.
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July is a month of peaks rather than sustained argument. The Lynch Friday, the Michael Chow Monday, Black Orpheus closing the Mythology Spotlight, the Coppola tribute on the last night - these are moments rather than threads, and the month is better for not trying to connect them all into something more unified than they are. Some months TCM is building a course. July, TCM is just programming good films with good company. That’s enough.
