TCM Monthly Preview: May 2025
May is the month TCM reminds you it can be a classroom when it wants to be, and I mean that as a compliment. The backbone of the entire month is “The Defining Frontier: The American Character in Westerns,” a nine-night TCM Spotlight that runs through Tuesdays and Thursdays from May 1st through the 29th. Each night has a thesis: The Foundation, The Quintessential Cowboy, Rugged Individualism, Social Commentary in Disguise, Heroism and Sacrifice, A Changing America, Cultural Breakthroughs, The American Psyche, and The End of an Era. Taken together it’s basically a semester course on how the Western genre absorbed every anxiety, aspiration, and contradiction that America had about itself across a hundred years of film. I’ll give each night its due as we move through the month.
Beyond the Spotlight, Mae West is Star of the Month across the Sundays, Memorial Day Weekend takes over four straight days at the end of the month, and there are a handful of individual nights that have nothing to do with Westerns and are some of the best programming of May anyway. Let’s get into it.
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Thursday, May 1st opens the Western Spotlight with Night 1: The Foundation. The night starts with The Great Train Robbery (1903) at 8pm - all 12 minutes of it - and moves through The Invaders (1912), The Squaw Man (1914), and The Iron Horse (1924). This is TCM doing what it does best, which is building context before it builds arguments. You can’t talk about where the Western went without showing where it started, and The Iron Horse is the real anchor here. Ford’s first masterpiece, an epic of railroad construction across the frontier that already contains the myth in embryo. It’s long and occasionally slow, but it’s worth every minute. The overnights run Tumbleweeds (1925) and The Winning of Barbara Worth (1926), both of which are better than their obscurity suggests.
Friday, May 2nd is National Paranormal Day programming, which is a fun bit of calendar-themed scheduling. Poltergeist (1982) at 8pm and The Haunting (1963) at 10:15 is a strong pairing. The Haunting is the better film in my opinion - Robert Wise directing Robert Wise directing Julie Harris in a haunted house film that understands the horror is almost entirely psychological and barely shows you anything. Zemeckis’s later remake proves definitively how badly that lesson can be missed. Poltergeist is a great time regardless. The overnight gives you Village of the Damned (1960), which held up on my most recent rewatch.
Saturday, May 3rd has the Lin-Manuel Miranda “Two for One” in prime time, pairing The Band Wagon (1953) and All That Jazz (1979). I want to be honest that this is a curatorial choice which on paper seems almost adversarial - the most perfectly cheerful MGM musical paired with a movie about a director literally dying from the effort of making a musical. But it works. The Band Wagon is Fred Astaire and Cyd Charisse and the “Dancing in the Dark” sequence and “That’s Entertainment” and I love it without reservation. All That Jazz is Fosse turning himself inside out, Roy Scheider doing something completely unhinged, and one of the most formally eccentric films in American cinema. Back to back they form an accidental argument about what show business costs, and I’m glad somebody put them together. Noir Alley gives us Riffraff (1947), which is a solid Pat O’Brien programmer.
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Sunday, May 4th is the first Mae West Sunday. Night After Night (1932) at 8pm, She Done Him Wrong (1933) at 9:30, I’m No Angel (1933) at 10:45. The lore around She Done Him Wrong is more fun than the film itself - West basically saved Paramount from bankruptcy with it, it got Cary Grant his first starring role, and it was one of the films most directly responsible for the Hayes Code crackdown. But I always find I’m No Angel to be the more enjoyable picture. West is looser in it, the comedy lands more consistently, and there’s something almost anarchic about how openly she’s doing exactly what the censors were about to tell her she couldn’t do anymore. The Silent Sunday entry at 12:30am is The Adventures of Prince Achmed (1926), which is Lotte Reiniger’s animated silhouette film and one of the earliest feature-length animated films ever made. It’s extraordinary and not enough people know about it.
Monday, May 5th runs a full Rogers and Hammerstein block in honor of Cinco de Mayo, which is a left-turn that I appreciate. Oklahoma! (1955), Carousel (1956), South Pacific (1958), Flower Drum Song (1961). These are big-screen spectaculars and they deserve to be watched that way. South Pacific is probably the most interesting of the four right now: the racial politics are complicated but the film is at least trying to have them, which puts it ahead of Carousel in certain respects. Oklahoma! is just a pleasure.
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Tuesday, May 6th is Western Spotlight Night 2: The Quintessential Cowboy - John Wayne and the Idea of America. The Big Trail (1930), Stagecoach (1939), Red River (1948), How the West Was Won (1962).
I wrote about all of these at length in my Ford blog post (edit: this post has since been removed to focus on streamlining this blog), so I’ll keep this focused on the programming logic rather than the films themselves. What I find smart about this night is that it doesn’t present Wayne as a monolith. The Big Trail is pre-mythology Wayne - wide-eyed, a little stiff, not yet the icon he’d become. Stagecoach is the birth of the icon. Red River is the icon complicated, a man whose certainty becomes tyranny and who has to be stopped by the younger generation he built. And How the West Was Won is the icon as national symbol, practically a monument. Watching these four in sequence is watching an image of America construct itself and then quietly begin to question whether it was ever real. Red River is the one I’d stay up for if you can only catch one - Howard Hawks at the absolute peak of his powers, and Montgomery Clift in his film debut going scene for scene with Wayne and winning.
Wednesday, May 7th is the TCM Imports Book night, and it’s stunning. The Girls (1968) at 8pm, Purple Noon (1960) at 10pm, The Vanishing (1988) at 12:15am, In the Mood for Love (2000) at 2:15am, Ikiru (1952) at 4am. This is five of the greatest foreign films ever made on consecutive nights and I don’t know what to prioritize. Purple Noon is the first Ripley adaptation, Alain Delon making Tom Ripley so beautiful and so blank that you almost forget how monstrous he is until it’s too late. The Vanishing - the Dutch original, not the American remake - is the most disturbing film on the list and one of the most disturbing films I’ve ever seen, in ways that have nothing to do with gore or conventional horror. And In the Mood for Love at 2:15 in the morning is actually its ideal viewing environment. Watch it in the dark. If you’re only catching one on this night, In the Mood for Love. If you’re catching two, add The Vanishing and don’t say I didn’t warn you.
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Thursday, May 8th is Western Spotlight Night 3: Rugged Individualism. The Man from Laramie (1955), Ride Lonesome (1959), Forty Guns (1957), High Plains Drifter (1973), and Hang ‘em High (1968).
This is the Anthony Mann / Budd Boetticher / Samuel Fuller section of the course, and it’s where the Western starts getting genuinely strange. Forty Guns is Fuller doing something almost avant-garde within the genre - Barbara Stanwyck as a rancher who controls an entire county, the power dynamics between women and men flipped and then flipped again, and compositions so audacious that you can feel Fuller daring the studio to stop him. Ride Lonesome is Boetticher stripped down to almost nothing: a bounty hunter, a woman, a fugitive, the desert, and about 70 minutes of moral geometry. It’s one of those films where you reach the end and realize every single scene was load-bearing. And High Plains Drifter is Eastwood’s first Western as director, and it’s genuinely unsettling - a ghost story masquerading as a revenge picture, with Eastwood playing a figure who may not be entirely human and a town that absolutely deserves what’s coming to it. This is a great night.
Friday, May 9th is the Mental Health Awareness Month programming curated by David O. Russell. The Swimmer (1968) at 8pm and A Streetcar Named Desire (1951) at 10pm. I think about The Swimmer a lot. Burt Lancaster swimming pool to pool through suburban Connecticut as his life incrementally reveals itself to be something other than what he believed it was; it shouldn’t work as well as it does, and it works completely. It’s about denial and memory and the particular American male fantasy of physical vitality as proof of moral worth. Streetcar doesn’t need me to sell it, but Vivien Leigh is doing something in that film that I can’t look away from. Duck Soup (1933) at 12:15am is a bit of a tonal whiplash after those two, but honestly after Streetcar you probably need it.
Saturday, May 10th is the Jamie Lee Curtis “Two for One” with The Manchurian Candidate (1962) and Sweet Smell of Success (1957) - which is a pairing that both makes sense thematically (paranoia, power, corruption) and doesn’t make much sense as a Jamie Lee Curtis tribute since she isn’t in either film. TCM does this sometimes, where the guest curator spotlight is really just an excuse to program something they wanted to program anyway, and I can never complain. The Manchurian Candidate is Frankenheimer at the peak of his powers, and Sweet Smell of Success is one of the most visually beautiful films about ugliness ever made. Tony Curtis and Burt Lancaster tearing each other apart in nocturnal New York while James Wong Howe shoots it like the city is complicit. Noir Alley gives us The Killers (1946), which is one of the absolute best entries in that slot all year - a near-perfect noir with Burt Lancaster’s film debut and Ava Gardner doing what Ava Gardner does.
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Sunday, May 11th is Mother’s Day and TCM has assembled an impressive all-day maternal programming block running from The Magnificent Ambersons (1942) at 6am to Mildred Pierce (1945) at 6pm. Mildred Pierce is the correct film to anchor Mother’s Day - a woman who sacrifices everything for a daughter who is essentially a monster, Joan Crawford giving one of the best performances of the classical era. The prime-time Mae West block gives you Belle of the Nineties (1934), Klondike Annie (1936), and Go West Young Man (1936) - these are the post-Code West films and they’re noticeably more constrained than the pre-Code work, but she’s still West and she still runs circles around everyone else in any scene she’s in.
Monday, May 12th is the Gene Hackman tribute, and this is one of the best single-night lineups of the month. Bonnie and Clyde (1967), The French Connection (1971), Hoosiers (1986), Mississippi Burning (1988), and Night Moves (1975). This was put together after Hackman’s death in February, and it reads like a genuine act of respect. What strikes me every time I think about this lineup is the range - the jittery New Wave energy of Bonnie and Clyde, the brutal kineticism of French Connection, the quiet emotional intelligence of Hoosiers, and then Night Moves at 4:15am, which is the one I’d actually lose sleep over. My dad (whose favorite actor is Hackman) first showed me this film back in 2023, and I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it since. Arthur Penn directing Hackman as a private detective trying and failing to find meaning in a case that keeps slipping through his fingers. It’s a film about people who can’t see the thing directly in front of them, and Hackman has never been more interior or more quietly desperate. If you’ve never seen it, this is the watch of the week.
Tuesday, May 13th is Western Spotlight Night 4: Social Commentary in Disguise. The Ox-Bow Incident (1943), Hombre (1967), The Great Silence (1968), Wichita (1955), and Sergeant Rutledge (1960).
The Ox-Bow Incident is the explicit one - a mob hanging, a moral failure, no redemption. It’s one of the few films in the classical Hollywood era that genuinely refuses you the comfort of a happy ending and means it. Hombre is the one that surprises me every time: Paul Newman as a white man raised by Apaches, reverse-engineering every assumption the Western had built up about savagery and civilization, and coming to a conclusion that’s almost nihilistic. And The Great Silence is the Italian entry on the night - Sergio Corbucci making a Western set in snow rather than desert, with a bounty killer protagonist who murders legally and a hero who can’t speak. It ends the way it ends and there is no negotiating with it. Three films in a row that are actively hostile to the genre’s usual consolations.
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Wednesday, May 14th spotlights Keiko Kishi, a Japanese actress whose films aren’t remotely well known here, and TCM is doing real work surfacing them. Kwaidan (1964) at 1:15am is the obvious highlight - Masaki Kobayashi’s anthology horror film, four ghost stories in saturated Technicolor with backdrops that look painted, one of the most visually distinctive Japanese films ever made. It’s a film I first discovered thanks to Criterion, and it’s a genuinely excellent entry point to Kishi’s work.
Thursday, May 15th is Western Spotlight Night 5: Heroism and Sacrifice. The Magnificent Seven (1960), High Noon (1952), My Darling Clementine (1946), A Fistful of Dollars (1964). This might be the most crowd-pleasing night of the entire Spotlight series. High Noon at 10:30pm is still the most purely efficient argument against cowardice that American cinema has produced - 84 minutes of real time, a community that abandons the man defending it, and Gary Cooper aging in front of the camera. My Darling Clementine at 12:15am is Ford at his most mythological, Henry Fonda as Wyatt Earp in a Tombstone that feels less like a real place than a dream of one. I always find myself comparing these two when I watch them close together - High Noon is about the disillusionment of heroism, Clementine is about its consecration. They don’t agree with each other, and that’s what makes putting them together meaningful.
Friday, May 16th is “Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid (and the films featured in it)” - a block that plays Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid (1982) and then runs several of the actual noir films that Carl Reiner spliced into it: This Gun for Hire (1942), In a Lonely Place (1950), and Deception (1946). This is a genuinely clever bit of programming. In a Lonely Place is the essential entry here - Nicholas Ray directing Humphrey Bogart as a screenwriter suspected of murder, and the film is less about the murder than about the violence that lives inside a man and the woman who tries to love him anyway. Gloria Grahame is as good in this film as anybody was in anything that year. White Heat (1949) runs at 5am - Cagney, “Top of the world, Ma,” and one of the most operatically deranged performances in all of noir.
Saturday, May 17th gives us the Two for One: John Carpenter with Frankenstein (1931) and The Curse of Frankenstein (1957). The Whale original and the Hammer remake is actually a great pairing - both films are about the same story and couldn’t be more different in what they decide the story is about. The Whale is about transgression and pity; the Fisher/Cushing/Lee version is about vanity and gore. Noir Alley runs Touchez pas au Grisbi (1954), which is Jacques Becker directing Jean Gabin in a French crime film that treats its aging criminal protagonist with more warmth and weariness than almost any American noir ever managed for the same archetype.
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Sunday, May 18th continues Mae West with Every Day’s a Holiday (1938) and My Little Chickadee (1940), the latter being her W.C. Fields collaboration. Their chemistry in that film is the specific pleasure of watching two people who are each funnier alone somehow make each other funnier together by competing for every scene.
Monday, May 19th is the Robert Redford night, anchored by Out of Africa (1985) at 8pm. I find Out of Africa long in the way that prestige pictures of its era often are, but Sydney Pollack directing Meryl Streep and the Kenyan landscape is at least something to look at. The real surprise of the night is The Candidate (1972) at 3am - Redford playing a senatorial candidate in a film that is specifically about the way political idealism gets packaged and sold, and which has aged considerably less well than it probably hoped to. It’s uncomfortable in some ways.
Tuesday, May 20th is Western Spotlight Night 6: A Changing America - Disillusionment and the Rise of the Antihero. Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969), The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966), The Outlaw Josey Wales (1976), and McCabe & Mrs. Miller (1971).
This is the night the Spotlight starts interrogating everything the previous five nights built. Butch Cassidy does it with charm and grief - outlaws who are too late for their own myth, running out of world. Leone does it with scale and nihilism. Josey Wales does it with Eastwood turning a revenge picture into something almost tenderly communitarian. And then McCabe & Mrs. Miller at 3:45am is Altman doing it with mud and failure and Leonard Cohen, a film in which the Western myth is so thoroughly dismantled that the genre can barely survive it. Julie Christie and Warren Beatty in the most beautiful, doomed film of the New Hollywood era. If you’re only catching one tonight, McCabe is the one you’ll still be thinking about at breakfast.
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Wednesday, May 21st spotlights Miyoshi Umeki, the first Asian American to win an Academy Award (Supporting Actress for Sayonara in 1957), and the overnight documentary Yellowface: Asian Whitewashing and Racism in Hollywood (2019) gives the block necessary critical context. Sayonara (1957) is a Brando film that tries harder than most of its era and still falls short in ways the documentary will help you articulate. The Umeki retrospective is the kind of programming that reminds you TCM is paying attention to history in ways that go beyond just “this is a great old movie.”
Wednesday, May 21st - Thursday, May 22nd is Western Spotlight Night 7: Cultural Breakthroughs. Broken Arrow (1950), Westward the Women (1951), Brokeback Mountain (2005), Buck and the Preacher (1972), and Devil’s Doorway (1950).
Broken Arrow and Devil’s Doorway are the early-50s films that tried, however imperfectly, to give Native Americans sympathetic portrayals - they came out the same year and are fascinating to compare. Westward the Women is William Wellman directing a wagon train story in which all the settlers are women and the premise is genuinely radical for 1951. And then Brokeback Mountain at midnight - Ang Lee’s film is one of the best American films of its decade and its presence in this Spotlight feels exactly right. It’s a Western that uses the landscape and the genre’s codes to tell a story the genre had never permitted before, and the ending hits no less hard no matter how many times you’ve seen it.
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Friday, May 23rd opens the Memorial Day Marathon with The Best Years of Our Lives (1946) at 8pm. I want to put this out there clearly: The Best Years of Our Lives is one of the greatest American films ever made. William Wyler directing a film about three servicemen returning home from World War 2 and finding that home has changed while they were gone - it’s almost three hours and earns every minute. Fredric March, Dana Andrews, Harold Russell (who was a real veteran who lost both hands in the war, and won an Oscar). The film refuses sentimentality about the homecoming without being cynical about the men. It’s a film that holds enormous complexity about what America owed these people and what it actually gave them, and it made an enormous amount of money in 1946, which means audiences recognized something true in it. If you watch nothing else during the Memorial Day weekend, watch this.
Saturday, May 24th through Monday, May 26th is the full Memorial Day Marathon, and I’ll give you a few picks from the blur rather than go hour by hour. The Steel Helmet (1951) on Saturday at 6:30pm is Samuel Fuller’s Korean War film, made while the war was still happening, and it’s tense and morally ambiguous in ways that bigger-budget war films couldn’t afford to be. The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957) on Sunday at 8pm is the obvious anchor of the weekend - Lean directing Alec Guinness and William Holden in one of the most elegant studies of obsession and duty ever filmed. The Great Escape (1963) on Monday at 8pm is the crowd-pleaser and earns it. And the Tarkovsky film Mirror (1975) at 2am on Sunday is TCM’s way of saying that even in a Memorial Day weekend block, there’s room for something completely outside the normal parameters. Mirror is not a war film exactly - it’s a memory film, an autobiography of consciousness, one of the most formally unusual things in the Imports catalog. Good luck sleeping after it.
Tuesday, May 27th is Western Spotlight Night 8: The American Psyche. The Searchers (1956) at 8pm, Duel in the Sun (1946) at 10:15, Winchester ‘73 (1950), I Shot Jesse James (1949), Blood on the Moon (1948).
The Searchers is the film the entire Spotlight has been building toward. Possibly Ford’s greatest film - possibly the greatest Western ever made - in which John Wayne plays a man searching for his kidnapped niece across years, driven by a hatred of the Comanches so profound that when he finds her he may not be able to see her as anything other than what she’s become to him. It’s a film that stares directly at the violence underneath the Western myth and doesn’t look away. I’ve watched it more times than I can count and the last shot still leaves me unable to move. Duel in the Sun is King Vidor doing a maximalist, overheated counter-argument - passion and violence and Jennifer Jones, almost a parody of the Western’s sexual repressions except that it plays completely straight and is compelling despite itself.
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Wednesday, May 28th gives you The Big Clock (1948) at 8pm - Ray Milland trapped inside a Kafkaesque media empire being used to hunt himself. It’s a paranoia picture that predates the Cold War cycle and feels more current with every passing year. Worth your time.
Thursday, May 29th is Western Spotlight Night 9: The End of an Era. Once Upon a Time in the West (1968), The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962), The Ballad of Cable Hogue (1970), The Wild Bunch (1969).
This is a night of eulogies and it’s the best night of the entire Spotlight.
Once Upon a Time in the West at 8pm - Leone’s requiem, with Henry Fonda cast against type as the most chilling villain in any Western, and a film that uses the genre’s visual language so completely that it simultaneously summarizes and buries it. Ennio Morricone’s score alone is worth three hours of your evening.
The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance at 11pm - Ford’s farewell to Monument Valley and to the myth he built, and the film in which he admits, through a newspaper editor, that the myth was always the point. “When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.” I said in the Ford blog that this might be my favorite Ford film. I’m not walking that back.
The Wild Bunch at 3:30am - Peckinpah’s controlled demolition of everything that came before, the bloodiest and most beautiful and most mournful Western ever made. It’s a film that hates what it loves, which makes it perfect company for where the Spotlight ends.
Running these four films in a single night is an act of genuine curatorial ambition. The Western genre builds its myth across 66 years of programming, and on this one Thursday night it takes the myth apart piece by piece and leaves you with the question of what any of it was actually for. That’s what good film programming does when it’s doing its job.
Friday, May 30th is Howard Hawks’ birthday and an Iowa-themed block that runs Field of Dreams (1989) - which I resist on principle and enjoy completely against my will every time - followed by State Fair (1945) and The Music Man (1962) overnight. A pleasant landing after the weight of the Spotlight night before.
Saturday, May 31st closes the month with the Two for One: Kathy Bates, pairing Bringing Up Baby (1938) and Stage Door (1937) in prime time. Bringing Up Baby is Katharine Hepburn and Cary Grant and a leopard named Baby and one of the most perfectly timed comedies ever assembled, and if you haven’t seen it I don’t know what to tell you. Noir Alley ends the month with The Big Steal (1949) - Robert Mitchum, Jane Greer, Mexico, a car chase. A fun 71-minute cap to the month.
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May 2025: The Superlatives
The One You Can’t Miss: The Searchers (May 27, 8pm). Western Spotlight Night 8, and the film the whole month has been in conversation with.
The Night of the Month: Western Spotlight Night 9 - May 29. Leone, Ford, Peckinpah. The genre ends in the span of one evening.
The One That Will Genuinely Disturb You: The Vanishing (May 7, 12:15am). Not a horror film, technically. Watch it anyway and report back.
The Underrated Entry: Night Moves (May 12, 4:15am). The Gene Hackman tribute goes deep and this is where it goes deepest.
The One to Stay Up For: McCabe & Mrs. Miller (May 20, 3:45am). Altman and mud and Leonard Cohen and the Western dying beautifully.
The Best Programming Idea of the Month: May 7’s TCM Imports Book night - five of the greatest foreign films of all time, back to back. In the Mood for Love at 2am is its own work of art.
The Double Feature That Works Best: The Manchurian Candidate and Sweet Smell of Success (May 10). Two films about power eating people alive, neither one willing to make it comfortable.
The Obvious Pick That’s Still the Right Call: The Best Years of Our Lives (May 23, 8pm). Three hours. Worth it. Non-negotiable.
The Performance Worth Your Time: Burt Lancaster in The Killers (Noir Alley, May 10, 12:15am). His first film. He arrives fully formed.
The Thread Worth Following: All nine Spotlight nights, in order, if you can manage it. Watch the myth build and then watch it come apart. By May 29 you'll feel it.
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May is a month with a real thesis. The Spotlight isn’t just a series of Western films - it’s an argument about what Westerns meant and what they finally couldn’t sustain. By the time you reach Leone and Ford and Peckinpah on the 29th, the genre has been constructed, complicated, corrupted, and laid to rest. That’s a lot of ground for one month to cover. TCM covers it.
