TCM Monthly Preview: November 2025
November arrives with a weight that October, for all its pleasures, doesn't quite have. October is fun. November is serious. The month opens with a memorial tribute to Robert Redford that runs all day on the second Sunday and constitutes one of the better single-day retrospectives TCM has assembled in recent memory. Rock Hudson is Star of the Month, and his 100th birthday lands on the 17th with a night of Douglas Sirk films that is among the most emotionally concentrated things on the calendar. The Conspiracy and Political Thrillers Spotlight runs Wednesdays and escalates toward a finale that pairs The China Syndrome with All the President's Men the Wednesday before Thanksgiving. There are two Trans Images on Film programming blocks across the month. Terry Gilliam gets a birthday tribute. Richard Burton gets his 100th. Nathan Lane programs Double Indemnity and Chinatown back to back on a November Saturday and I want to talk about that. And Thanksgiving weekend gives you Carol Burnett as curator, which turns out to be more interesting than it sounds.
November is also, I think, the month where TCM's political seriousness becomes most visible. The Spotlight's pairing of films about assassination, coverup, whistleblowing, and surveillance with November's civic calendar - Veterans Day, the approach of the Thanksgiving holiday - feels pointed rather than accidental. I'll note it where it comes up.
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Saturday, November 1st opens the month with the Kathy Bates Two for One: Bringing Up Baby (1938) and Stage Door (1937). Neither stars Bates, which means this is the programming slot functioning as curator's permission slip, and the permission here is excellent. Bringing Up Baby I've written about more than once. Stage Door is the underrated one - Gregory La Cava directing a script by Kaufman and Ferber about a theatrical boarding house full of women trying to break into show business, and the film is about ambition and luck and the cruelty of a system that decides which women get to succeed and which don't. Katharine Hepburn, Ginger Rogers, Lucille Ball, Ann Miller, Andrea Leeds. The ensemble is remarkable and the film has no male hero because it doesn't need one.
Sunday, November 2nd - Robert Redford Memorial Tribute.
All day, from 6am to nearly dawn. The program runs chronologically through his career: A Bridge Too Far (1977) and Barefoot in the Park (1967) in the morning, Downhill Racer (1969) and The Candidate (1972) before lunch, All the President's Men (1976) and The Sting (1973) in the afternoon, then Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969) at 8pm, The Way We Were (1973) at 10pm, A River Runs Through It (1992) at 12:15am.
I want to say something about Redford that I think gets missed in the standard tributes, which tend to reduce him to his good looks and his partnership with Newman. Redford was not primarily a movie star. He was a deeply political filmmaker who happened to also be a movie star - the founder of Sundance, the person most responsible for the infrastructure of American independent cinema as it exists today, a man who made The Candidate in 1972 about a politician who wins by selling himself as empty charisma and is so disturbed by the accuracy of the prediction that he's repeated the story in interviews for fifty years. His best performances have a withholding quality that reads as cool but is actually a very specific kind of interior - a man who isn't sure what he wants and is afraid to find out.
The essential sequence today is All the President's Men at 3pm into The Sting at 5:30. The Pakula film is the greatest political journalism picture ever made, not because of its accuracy to the Watergate record but because Pakula and Redford and Hoffman found the film inside the procedure - the tedium, the dead ends, the bureaucratic patience required to break a story that a government is actively trying to bury - and made it as suspenseful as any thriller. The Redford of All the President's Men is Redford at his most controlled and most precise. Then The Sting is the release valve, pure pleasure, con artistry elevated to formal art, and the Newman-Redford chemistry is so natural that the film almost doesn't need its plot.
The Way We Were at 10pm is the one I expect to leave me undone, as it always does. Pollack directing Streisand and Redford in a love story that is also an argument about American politics and the HUAC era and what people compromise when they choose comfort over principle, and the film has the honesty to show us a relationship that should have failed earlier than it did and that both people are better for having had. The ending is one of the most quietly correct endings in Hollywood romance.
The TCM Imports this night deserve a flag: Manila in the Claws of Light (1975) at 2am and Touki Bouki (1973) at 4:15am. Two of the most important films in global cinema that TCM has programmed this year, practically hidden at the end of a memorial tribute day. Lino Brocka's Manila is the masterpiece of Philippine cinema, a film about a young man searching for his girlfriend in the slums and factories of the city, shot with a documentary rawness that was genuinely dangerous - Brocka was arrested by Marcos's regime multiple times for his political filmmaking. Touki Bouki is Djibril Diop Mambéty's Senegalese film that predates and in some ways outpaces the French New Wave films it's in conversation with - two young people in Dakar dreaming of France, and a film that is formally one of the most original things produced anywhere in world cinema in the 1970s. Staying up for these at 2am on a Sunday night is a commitment. It is worth it.
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Monday, November 3rd runs the Jerry Goldsmith Spotlight: Seven Days in May (1964), The Boys from Brazil (1978), Papillon (1973). Goldsmith scored all three, and the programming choice is smart because his signature - the way he used orchestral color and percussive insistence to make political paranoia feel physical - is most legible across these three films rather than in any one of them alone. Seven Days in May at 8pm is the essential entry: a General (Burt Lancaster) attempting a military coup against a President who is too willing to make peace, and Fredric March as the President and Kirk Douglas as the aide who discovers the plot, and a film that takes democratic institutions seriously enough to imagine their defeat with genuine dread. Frankenheimer directed it the same year as The Manchurian Candidate. He was thinking about something.
Tuesday, November 4th opens the Rock Hudson Star of the Month with Winchester '73 (1950) at 8pm and Giant (1956) at 9:45. Hudson is at the Star of the Month for reasons that are partly about his talent and partly about what his centennial year asks us to reckon with - a gay man in the Hollywood system managed and marketed as the ideal heterosexual male, his actual life invisible to the films he made until the end of it. The month builds toward his birthday night on the 18th, when the Sirk films will make that argument more completely. Giant is the film where he's most fully present, and the late sequence where Jett Rink has become rich and old and drunk and humiliated at his own banquet is still one of the more unsettling images of American success the cinema has produced.
Wednesday, November 5th opens the Conspiracy and Political Thrillers Spotlight: The Day of the Jackal (1973), Z (1969), The Manchurian Candidate (1962), Blow Out (1981). Costa-Gavras' Z at 10:30pm is the film that most directly earned the Spotlight its name - a dramatization of the assassination of Greek left-wing politician Grigoris Lambrakis and the government cover-up that followed, made while the Greek military junta was still in power, and one of the films most responsible for the political thriller becoming a legitimate genre. It opens with a title card informing you that any resemblance to real events is deliberate. Blow Out at 3am is De Palma making the Antonioni Blow-Up premise explicit: a sound man records an assassination, and the film is about how evidence gets suppressed and destroyed by the systems meant to protect it. De Palma made it in 1981. It has not aged out of relevance.
Thursday, November 6th spotlights Ronald Colman. Beau Geste (1926) at 8pm, A Tale of Two Cities (1935) at 10:15, Random Harvest (1942) at 12:30am. Colman is the quintessential British actor of the classical Hollywood era, and his particular quality - the melancholy underneath the elegance, the sense of a man carrying something he won't name - makes Random Harvest at 12:30am the film I'd stay up for. An amnesiac World War I veteran who marries and builds a life and then regains his earlier memories and forgets the life he's built - and the film is about the loss that follows the recovery as much as the loss that preceded it.
Friday, November 7th runs the Objects of Desire theme: The Wizard of Oz (1939), Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981), The Maltese Falcon (1941). The programming logic is satisfying - three films in which the desired object is ultimately either absent, destroyed, or revealed to have never been what anyone thought it was. The Arc of the Covenant, the Maltese Falcon, the Emerald City. Dorothy goes home. The Maltese Falcon at 4:15am is the one worth staying up for if you've somehow not seen it recently: Huston's debut, Bogart's signature, the hardest-edged studio thriller of the decade, and a film whose ending is as bleak as any noir produced in the classical era.
Saturday, November 8th has the Brian Tyree Henry Two for One: Imitation of Life (1959) at 8pm and The Learning Tree (1969) at 10:15. This is the programming slot used as genuine curatorial argument. Imitation of Life I've written about - Sirk's most devastating film, the racial passing subplot, the final scene. The Learning Tree is Gordon Parks' autobiographical film, the first major Hollywood feature directed by a Black filmmaker, and its placement against Imitation of Life creates a conversation about how Black American life has been filmed and by whom. Parks was making The Learning Tree in Kansas; Sirk had made Imitation of Life in Hollywood as a German émigré looking at American race through a foreigner's formal precision. The two films together ask: whose story is it, and who gets to tell it?
Sunday, November 9th spotlights Zita Johann, and the anchor is The Mummy (1932) at 9:15pm - Boris Karloff as Imhotep, a film that is genuinely stranger and more melancholy than its reputation as a horror entry suggests. It's really a film about obsessive love that crosses centuries, and Johann's performance as the woman who carries an ancient Egyptian soul is one of the more underrated things in the Universal horror cycle. The TCM Imports give you Larisa Shepitko's The Ascent (1977) at 2am - a Soviet film about two soldiers captured by Nazis during World War II, and one of the most formally controlled and spiritually serious films made anywhere in the 1970s. Shepitko died in a car accident before completing her next film; The Ascent is her masterpiece and it deserves to be far better known in the West.
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Monday, November 10th - Richard Burton's 100th Birthday.
Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966) at 8pm, The Robe (1953) at 10:30, Look Back in Anger (1959) at 1am, Night of the Iguana (1964) at 3am.
Burton was the most educated voice in Hollywood - trained at Oxford, shaped by Philip Burton who recognized him as a prodigy at 17, a man who memorized Shakespeare the way other actors memorized scripts and who considered himself primarily a stage actor doing film work for the money he needed to drink at the level he'd committed to. This self-deprecation about his film career is exactly wrong, which the birthday night makes clear.
Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? is the film. Mike Nichols' debut, Taylor and Burton, Albee's play about a marriage constructed entirely of mutual destruction, and Burton playing George with a specificity and restraint that is easy to overlook in the presence of the more visible pyrotechnics around him. He is the still point of a very loud film, a man who has fully understood what his life has become and has decided that understanding it is the only dignity left. He was 41. He'd been through two marriages, one to Taylor, and he had another ahead of him. The film was released the year before they divorced the first time.
Look Back in Anger at 1am is the earlier Burton, the angry young man who started it all - Osborne's play, Tony Richardson directing, and Burton as Jimmy Porter, one of the definitive British working-class intellectual anti-heroes. The rage in that performance comes from somewhere genuine and you can feel it. Night of the Iguana at 3am is the late John Huston, Tennessee Williams, Burton as a defrocked minister in Mexico, and one of the great night-in-the-soul films. Stay up for both.
Tuesday, November 11th is Veterans Day, with the Rock Hudson Star of the Month continuing on war films: Battle Hymn (1957) and Ice Station Zebra (1968). Ice Station Zebra is the film Howard Hughes reportedly watched hundreds of times in his last years, alone in a hotel room, ordering it screened repeatedly. It's a Cold War thriller set in the Arctic, Hudson and Ernest Borgnine and Patrick McGoohan, and it's overlong and strangely compelling and whatever Hughes was looking for in it I've never been able to identify. The fact that this was a Hudson film adds a layer to the repeated viewings that Hughes couldn't have known about.
Wednesday, November 12th runs the Conspiracy Spotlight Week 2: North by Northwest (1959) at 8pm, The Ipcress File (1965) at 10:30, Gorky Park (1983) at 12:30am, Fail-Safe (1964) at 2:45am. North by Northwest is Hitchcock's most purely pleasurable film and the one where the conspiracy architecture is at its most playful - Roger Thornhill doesn't understand what's happening to him for the entire first act, which is structurally the position the audience is always in during political thrillers, and the film is partly about the comedy of being caught inside a story whose rules you don't know. The Ipcress File is the anti-North by Northwest: Sidney Furie and Otto Heller finding the spy film through grimy London windows and unglamorous procedure, Michael Caine in his star-making role as Harry Palmer, a spy who wears glasses and cooks his own food and treats espionage as a difficult job rather than an adventure.
Thursday, November 13th is the Salute to Early Sound night, anchored by Singin' in the Rain (1952) at 9:15pm but framed by a documentary about the transition to sound cinema - the preamble The Invention of Cinema: Cinema Finds its Voice at 8pm - and then, crucially, His Glorious Night (1929) at 11:15pm, the film that is credited with ending John Gilbert's career because his voice didn't match his romantic image, and Blackmail (1929) at 1:15am, Hitchcock's first sound film, followed by the 2024 documentary Becoming Hitchcock: The Legacy of Blackmail. This is the night with the most genuine film-historical ambition in November. His Glorious Night comes before Singin' in the Rain specifically so that you can hear what Lina Lamont's problem actually sounded like before the musical shows you the comedy of it. The documentary sequencing around Blackmail is equally thoughtful - you see the film and then you see how it changed the person who made it. Hallelujah (1929) at 4am is King Vidor's all-Black-cast sound film, the first major Hollywood production to focus on Black life as subject rather than caricature, and its placement at the end of this historically minded night is appropriate.
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Friday, November 14th - Terry Gilliam's 85th Birthday.
Brazil (1985) at 8pm, 12 Monkeys (1995) at 10:30, Time Bandits (1981) at 1am, Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975) at 3am, Life of Brian (1979) at 4:45am.
Brazil is the film that contains Gilliam most completely - a dystopian satire of bureaucracy, conformity, and the violence of optimism, and the best argument that science fiction can function as political philosophy rather than spectacle. Sam Lowry in his dream sequences is the version of himself he cannot be in his waking life, and the film is about what happens when the imagination is the only freedom left and the state comes for that too. The ending is one of the most disturbing in American cinema, a man retreating so completely into fantasy that the retreat looks, from outside, like defeat. Robert De Niro in a brief, glorious turn as a rebel plumber. Villagers beware.
12 Monkeys at 10:30 is the film that most clearly demonstrates Gilliam's ability to work inside genre - a time-travel thriller that is more interested in memory and free will than in plot mechanics - and Bruce Willis giving one of his most interior performances as a man who knows the future and can't prevent it. Time Bandits at 1am is the children's film that terrified a generation of children who watched it and realized immediately that it was not actually for children. The ending. The ending.
Saturday, November 15th has the Steve Buscemi Two for One: Scarecrow (1973) and Dog Day Afternoon (1975). Two films about men on the losing end of American capitalism who aren't quite able to articulate what that means. Gene Hackman and Al Pacino in Scarecrow - a road film that is genuinely sad in ways road films usually refuse to be; Pacino alone in Dog Day Afternoon - Lumet directing a bank robbery that becomes a public event, Pacino's Sonny Wortzik using the robbery to fund his partner's gender reassignment surgery, and the film treating that fact with a matter-of-factness that was extraordinary in 1975. The Noir Alley gives us Kurosawa's High and Low (1963), which is not quite a noir but is the best entry the slot has had in months - a kidnapping film that divides itself exactly in half, before and after, the rich businessman in his hilltop house and the detective descending into the underworld below. One of the most formally perfect films Kurosawa made.
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Sunday, November 16th features Jeff Bridges in prime time - The Big Lebowski (1998) at 8pm - which is TCM correctly identifying that The Dude is a cultural institution that requires no justification. The TCM Imports give you Mizoguchi's The Life of Oharu (1952) at 2am, one of the great films about a woman's systematic degradation at the hands of a society that treats her as property, filmed with the rigorous camera movement that makes Mizoguchi one of the handful of indispensable directors. And at 4:30am: Fassbinder's Lola (1981), his color-saturated melodrama about corruption in postwar Germany, a woman who is a cabaret singer and a wealthy man's mistress and knows exactly what she's worth in the economy she inhabits. Two films about women and what systems do to them, back to back, between 2am and 7am. The Imports programmers know exactly what they're doing.
Monday, November 17th is Trans Images on Film, Part 1: Come Back to the 5 & Dime Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean (1982) at 8pm, Some of My Best Friends Are… (1971) at 10pm, Vertigo (1958) at midnight, Funeral Parade of Roses (1969) at 2:15am, The Brood (1979) at 4:15am.
Robert Altman's Come Back to the 5 & Dime is the anchor and the essential entry - a group of James Dean fan club members reuniting twenty years after his death in a small Texas town, and the film builds toward a revelation about one of its characters that reframes everything preceding it, played by Karen Black with a fragility and stubbornness that is among the best things Altman got from an ensemble. Funeral Parade of Roses at 2:15am is Toshio Matsumoto's Japanese New Wave film about gay and trans life in Tokyo, formally anarchic, shot partly documentary-style and partly as experimental cinema, and it influenced Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange - Kubrick cited it directly. It is one of the films in this month's schedule that I suspect most people reading this have not seen. It is extraordinary.
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Tuesday, November 18th - Rock Hudson's 100th Birthday: The Douglas Sirk Night.
Magnificent Obsession (1954) at 8pm, All That Heaven Allows (1955) at 10pm, Written on the Wind (1956) at 11:45pm, The Tarnished Angels (1957) at 1:45am.
I want to be direct about why this night matters beyond the retrospective occasion. Douglas Sirk was a German émigré who fled the Nazis and spent the 1950s making what appeared to be glossy Universal melodramas about white middle-class American life. They were marketed as women's pictures. They were, in fact, the most systematic critique of postwar American society that Hollywood produced during that decade - films in which the gorgeous Technicolor and the sweeping scores are the ideology being satirized, the visual equivalent of the conformity and material comfort that the characters are suffocating inside.
And at the center of the most important of these films was Rock Hudson - a gay man performing straightness at the studio's direction, cast as the embodiment of heterosexual romantic desire, and working with a director who was performing contentment while producing critique. There is something about that double performance, that shared knowledge of living inside a constructed identity, that I think explains why the Sirk-Hudson collaborations are as emotionally deep as they are. They were both saying something they couldn't say directly.
All That Heaven Allows at 10pm is the one to center the evening on. Jane Wyman as a wealthy widow who falls in love with her gardener (Hudson), and the social pressure applied by her children and community to end the relationship. Sirk films the television set that the children give Wyman as a consolation gift - the implicit replacement for a human relationship with a screen - with a composition that was famous enough for Fassbinder to quote it directly in Ali: Fear Eats the Soul. It's a film about a woman being told what she's allowed to want, and Hudson playing the gardener with a openness and warmth that the film presents as a reproach to everything surrounding it. Written on the Wind at 11:45 is Sirk at his most excessive - Robert Stack and Dorothy Malone as the doomed oil money siblings, Hudson and Lauren Bacall as the stable normality around which they circle and destroy themselves, and the whole film shot in the colors of pure melodrama. Malone won the Oscar for Supporting Actress. Stack should have won for Actor. Both were robbed by a category that couldn't see what they were doing.
Wednesday, November 19th continues the Conspiracy Spotlight: The Odessa File (1974), Marathon Man (1976), Man Hunt (1941), 36 Hours (1964). Marathon Man at 10:15pm is the essential entry and Dustin Hoffman running through Central Park and Laurence Olivier's Nazi dentist asking the most terrifying question in the conspiracy thriller genre. Fritz Lang's Man Hunt at 12:30am is the World War II entry, a British hunter who has Hider in his sights on a sporting trip and can't bring himself to pull the trigger, and then spends the rest of the film being hunted in return, and it is Lang at his most expressionist and most morally precise.
Thursday, November 20th is the Neo Noir night with Eddie Muller: Point Blank (1967), The Late Show (1977), Performance (1970). Boorman's Point Blank is the most formally radical entry - Lee Marvin as a man who may or may not be dead seeking vengeance in a corporate Los Angeles, and the film's fractured time structure and color-coded spaces make it feel decades ahead of its production year. Performance at midnight is Roeg and Cammell's film that defines its era by refusing to be containable by it - James Fox as a gangster hiding in Mick Jagger's house, and a film that takes the early 1970s' interest in identity dissolution more seriously and more dangerously than anything around it. The overnight gives you Nicolas Roeg's Walkabout (1971) at 2am, which is not noir but is Roeg - a white Australian girl lost in the outback with a Wardaman boy performing his walkabout, and one of the most beautiful and most melancholy films about cultural encounter ever made.
Friday, November 21st is Goldie Hawn's 80th birthday. Cactus Flower (1969), Butterflies Are Free (1972), Foul Play (1978). Hawn is the performer whose talent the industry most consistently underestimated by casting her as comedic fluff when she was capable of considerably more - Swing Shift (1984) at 2am is the film that demonstrates this most clearly, Jonathan Demme directing her in a World War II home front story that she co-produced and that the studio re-cut against her wishes. The version on screen is a compromise. The performance survives it anyway.
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Saturday, November 22nd - The Nathan Lane Two for One: Double Indemnity (1944) and Chinatown (1974).
I want to give this its due. Nathan Lane programming Double Indemnity and Chinatown back to back on a Saturday night in November is one of the sharpest curatorial choices in any Two for One slot this year. Both films are about a private investigation of a crime that turns out to be far larger than it appeared. Both films end in total defeat. In Double Indemnity, the investigator and the criminal are the same person. In Chinatown, the investigator understands too late what he was really investigating. And both films are about how women's bodies and fates get decided by men who believe they're acting in their own interests. The 30 years between them chart something about how American cinema's relationship to cynicism shifted from noir's professional fatalism to the 1970s' genuine hopelessness.
Double Indemnity is Wilder and Chandler and Stanwyck and MacMurray, and I have nothing to add to the existing literature except that the film is even better on revisit than on first view because you spend the whole second viewing watching MacMurray's Neff making every decision wrong and understanding why they seemed right to him each time. Chinatown is Polanski and Towne and Nicholson and Dunaway, and the ending remains as devastating as it was in 1974. Jake's problem, the film suggests, is that he learned his lesson from Chinatown - don't get involved, you'll only make things worse - and learned it too well. The one time he should have intervened is the time he falls back on hard-won professional cynicism. The defeat is total. This is the night.
Sunday, November 23rd has the Joan Crawford double feature: Queen Bee (1955) and Autumn Leaves (1956). Queen Bee is Crawford in full monster mode - a Southern matriarch who dominates her household through psychological manipulation - and it's the kind of film where you can't look away from the performance even while the character is doing things the film is clearly judging. Autumn Leaves at 10pm is the corrective - Crawford vulnerable, playing an older woman who falls for a younger man and discovers he may not be who he claimed - and the film is genuinely surprising in how much sympathy it grants her. The TCM Imports give you René Cardona's Deep Crimson (1996) at 2am - a Mexican film about the Lonely Hearts Killers, bleaker and stranger than the American film versions - and Purple Noon (1960) at 4am, René Clément's Ripley adaptation with Alain Delon, one of the most amoral and gorgeous films in the French crime catalog.
Monday, November 24th is Trans Images on Film, Part 2: Dog Day Afternoon (1975), Ma Vie En Rose (1997), The Christine Jorgensen Story (1970), Paris is Burning (1990), Dressed in Blue (1983). The pair of Jennie Livingston's Paris is Burning at 2am and Dressed in Blue at 3:30am is the most valuable sequence here - one American and one Spanish documentary about trans communities, made within a decade of each other, both portrait films that give their subjects dignity through specificity. Paris is Burning belongs on every list of essential American documentaries; Dressed in Blue is barely discussed outside Spain and deserves the exposure.
Tuesday, November 25th is Rock Hudson With Doris Day: Pillow Talk (1959), Lover Come Back (1961), Send Me No Flowers (1964). I wrote about the structural irony of these films in the September preview - Hudson performing heterosexual desirability opposite a Doris Day whose own image was being managed and simplified by the same industry - and I'll add here only that the best of the three is Lover Come Back, which Delbert Mann directed with a sharper edge than the others, a film that is more willing to let both characters be calculating and self-interested and charming about it simultaneously.
Wednesday, November 26th closes the Conspiracy Spotlight with its most politically charged night: The China Syndrome (1979) at 8pm and All the President's Men (1976) at 10:15pm. The China Syndrome opened 12 days before the Three Mile Island accident and became, overnight, a different kind of film - a thriller about a nuclear plant cover-up that was suddenly also a documentary about what was actually happening. Jane Fonda, Jack Lemmon, James Bridges directing, and Lemmon giving one of his great serious performances as a plant supervisor who knows something is wrong and can't make anyone listen. Playing it the night before Thanksgiving against All the President's Men - the night before a national holiday about collective gratitude - is TCM making a quiet point about what the country owes the people who try to tell it the truth.
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Thursday, November 27th - Thanksgiving with Carol Burnett: Little Miss Broadway (1938), Top Hat (1935), Show Boat (1951). This is not Carol Burnett's films - it's Carol Burnett curating a Thanksgiving night of musical films she loves, and the selection is impeccably warm without being simple. Top Hat is Astaire and Rogers at the peak of the collaboration, and if you're going to watch one Fred and Ginger film, this is the one, if only for "Cheek to Cheek" and what happens to Astaire's body when the music starts. Show Boat is Howard Keel and Kathryn Grayson in the MGM version, which is gorgeous if less mordant than the source material. Kiss Me Kate (1953) runs at 1:30am for the very dedicated. Thanksgiving weekend is deliberately lighter than the surrounding weeks, and that's correct.
Friday, November 28th continues Thanksgiving with Carol Burnett: Sweet Rosie O'Grady (1943), 42nd Street (1933), Gold Diggers of 1933. 42nd Street at 11:30pm is the Busby Berkeley film, the one where Berkeley treats a stage floor as a canvas and the dancers as geometry, and the overhead shots are the thing - the human body as abstract pattern. If you've never seen a Busby Berkeley musical, 42nd Street is the one to start with, because the rest of them are more elaborate and less surprising, and the first time you see the overhead camera open up the stage floor into impossible dimensions is one of those moments where you understand why people fell in love with cinema.
Saturday, November 29th has the Joe Dante Two for One return: The Night of the Hunter (1955) and The Fool Killer (1965), which is the same pairing from the July 5th slot. I didn't complain then and I won't now - The Night of the Hunter is a film worth programming repeatedly, and if you missed it in July, November gives you another chance. Noir Alley gives us Postmark for Danger (1955), a modest British thriller worth catching. The overnight runs Wilder's Love in the Afternoon (1957) at 1:45am - Gary Cooper, Audrey Hepburn, the most strained age-gap romance of Wilder's career, and a film I admire more than I love because Wilder is too honest about what's uncomfortable to let the charm fully settle.
Sunday, November 30th closes November with Diane Ladd's 90th birthday: Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore (1974) at 8pm and Rambling Rose (1991) at 10pm. Scorsese's Alice is the road film that prefigures everything Ladd's career would become - a woman raising a son alone, working as a waitress, figuring out what she wants with no template for wanting it - and Ladd as Flo is the film's most purely entertaining element, a waitress with no patience for sentiment and an endless appetite for direct speech. Rambling Rose pairs her with her actual daughter Laura Dern in a 1930s Southern family story, and the film is one of the better-kept secrets in early 1990s American cinema.
The TCM Imports give you Kurosawa's Madadayo (1993) at 2:15am - his last film, made at 83, about a retired professor and the students who gather to toast him each year, a film of pure warmth and the most unguarded ending he ever made. The title means "not yet" - the answer the professor gives each year when asked if he is ready to die. Not yet. It is a film made by an old man who loved cinema and students and was not ready yet either. November ends with this, quietly, at 2 in the morning.
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November 2025: The Superlatives
The Day You Can't Miss: Robert Redford Memorial Tribute, November 2. All the President's Men into The Sting into Butch Cassidy into The Way We Were. Stay through A River Runs Through It at 12:15am. The Imports at the end will repay the sleeplessness.
The Night of the Month: Rock Hudson's 100th Birthday, November 18. Four Sirk films. All That Heaven Allows at 10pm. The most emotionally concentrated programming in November.
The Double Feature That Works Best: Nathan Lane's Double Indemnity and Chinatown, November 22. Thirty years apart, the same defeat, different reasons. Best Two for One of the year.
The Spotlight Worth Following: Conspiracy and Political Thrillers, all Wednesdays. The Spotlight escalates correctly - from the pleasures of North by Northwest to the moral weight of China Syndrome and All the President's Men the night before Thanksgiving.
The Discovery of the Month: Funeral Parade of Roses (November 17, 2:15am). Influenced A Clockwork Orange. Still ahead of most of what followed it.
The TCM Imports Sequence of the Month: November 2 - Manila in the Claws of Light at 2am, Touki Bouki at 4:15am. Two of the most important films in world cinema, practically hidden at the end of a memorial tribute. Stay up.
The Performance Worth Your Time: Richard Burton in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (November 10, 8pm). The still point of a very loud film, a man who has understood exactly what his life has become.
The Late Night Worth Losing Sleep For: Madadayo (November 30, 2:15am). Kurosawa's last film. Not yet. Not yet.
The Hidden Treasure: The Ascent (November 9, TCM Imports, 2am). Larisa Shepitko's Soviet masterpiece. One of the most formally controlled and spiritually serious films made anywhere in the 1970s.
The Thread Worth Following: The Trans Images on Film blocks on November 17 and 24. TCM programming these as recurring themes rather than one-offs is the right decision, and Funeral Parade of Roses, Come Back to the 5 & Dime, and Paris is Burning together across two weeks constitute a genuinely substantial survey.
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November is a month in which TCM's political seriousness and its cultural generosity operate simultaneously. The Conspiracy Spotlight takes its subject seriously enough to escalate toward Thanksgiving rather than away from it. The Redford memorial takes the full measure of a career rather than settling for the icons. The Rock Hudson birthday asks you to hold his talent and what it cost him in the same thought. The Trans Images programming treats its subject with the same matter-of-fact seriousness as any other recurring theme. And the month ends, very quietly, with Kurosawa at 83 saying he is not ready yet. Neither, November seems to suggest, should we be.
