TCM Monthly Preview: September 2025
September is one of those months where TCM is clearly working at a higher organizational level than it might first appear. On the surface it looks like a pleasant collection of themed evenings and star tributes. Look closer and the architecture reveals itself: the Edith Head Spotlight runs four Wednesdays in succession, building a complete portrait of a costume designer across her career. The Interracial Romance series with film historian Donald Bogle runs two consecutive Fridays and takes the subject seriously enough to provide intellectual context rather than just programming. The William Wyler tribute spans two Thursdays, pre-war and post-war, which is a genuinely smart way to organize a filmmaker's career. Paul Thomas Anderson programs a Friday near the end of the month. And September closes with James Dean, Nicholas Ray, and what may be the most emotionally concentrated single evening of the fall.
Also: Peter Sellers is Star of the Month for his 100th birthday, which gives the recurring Monday slot a different flavor than the purely nostalgic tributes we've had - Sellers was not sentimental about himself or his art, and his best performances were acts of controlled self-erasure that still feel more radical than most actors' most daring choices. September is a month worth paying close attention to.
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Monday, September 1st opens the month with the 150 Years of Edgar Rice Burroughs celebration, running the Johnny Weissmuller Tarzan films from 8pm straight through to sunrise. Tarzan the Ape Man (1932) at 8pm, Tarzan and His Mate (1934) at 10pm - and of all of them, Tarzan and His Mate is the one that most rewards attention as a cultural artifact. It's the most physically expressive and the most overtly sexual of the Weissmuller films, made right at the edge of the Hays Code's enforcement, and Maureen O'Sullivan's costuming alone is a document of what would shortly become forbidden. It's a pre-Code film hiding inside an adventure serial, and it's more interesting than the franchise reputation would lead you to believe.
Tuesday, September 2nd is Hawks and Grant night - His Girl Friday (1940) at 8pm, I Was a Male War Bride (1949) at 10pm, Monkey Business (1952) at midnight, Bringing Up Baby (1938) at 2am. I've written about Bringing Up Baby before and my position hasn't changed - it is one of the most perfectly assembled screwball comedies in existence and the word "perfect" is doing literal work there, not enthusiastic work. Every element is calibrated. But watching it at 2am after the three other Grant-Hawks films that precede it changes how it lands, because by then you've spent an evening watching Grant's particular gift - the ability to be completely flustered without losing his dignity, to be the straight man who is also the butt of every joke - and Bringing Up Baby is where that gift reaches its fullest expression.
Wednesday, September 3rd opens the Edith Head Spotlight with "The Early Years." Wings (1927) at 8pm, Love Me Tonight (1932) at 10:30, She Done Him Wrong (1933) at 12:15am, Double Indemnity (1944) at 3:30am. The Spotlight is structured as a career retrospective, which is the right way to honor Head - she won eight Academy Awards for Costume Design, a record that still stands, and her work is inseparable from the visual identity of classical Hollywood in ways that extend far beyond the films where the costumes are overtly discussed. Double Indemnity at 3:30am is the essential entry for this night: Barbara Stanwyck's anklet, her blonde wig, the whole visual construction of Phyllis Dietrichson as a trap. Head designed the trap. The film couldn't exist without her.
Thursday, September 4th is "Noir or Not Noir?" - Monsieur Verdoux (1947) at 8pm, Blood on the Moon (1948) at 10:15, Unfaithfully Yours (1948) at midnight, The Beast with Five Fingers (1946) at 2am. Chaplin's Verdoux is the most interesting case here, a film that got him blacklisted more effectively than any political accusation could - a comedy about a man who murders wealthy women for their money, which Chaplin argued was no different from what nations do in wartime, and which America in 1947 was not prepared to hear. It's bracingly uncomfortable even now. Preston Sturges' Unfaithfully Yours at midnight is the formal opposite - a screwball conductor who imagines murdering his wife three different ways during a concert and then tries to execute the plan, and it is one of the most precisely timed comedies of its decade. Both films have been called noir. Neither quite is. That ambiguity is the theme.
Friday, September 5th opens the Donald Bogle Interracial Romance series. Show Boat (1936) at 8pm, Island in the Sun (1957) at 10:15, The World, the Flesh and the Devil (1959) at 12:30am, A Patch of Blue (1965) at 2:15am, Ali: Fear Eats the Soul (1974) at 4am.
The World, the Flesh and the Devil at 12:30 is the film I want to flag from this night. Harry Belafonte alone in New York after a nuclear catastrophe, then finding Inger Stevens, then Mel Ferrer arriving and the film building toward a race-inflected love triangle in an otherwise empty Manhattan. It was made in 1959, which means the racial politics are both more advanced than almost anything else being made at that moment and still constrained by what the industry was willing to let reach the screen. The film can't quite commit to what it keeps implying, but the performance of not-committing is itself fascinating. And the images of Belafonte alone in a vacant New York are still haunting.
Fassbinder's Ali: Fear Eats the Soul at 4am is the Bogle series making its most radical gesture - a German film, explicitly in conversation with Douglas Sirk's melodrama tradition, about a Moroccan immigrant and an elderly German cleaning woman, and what their relationship costs both of them inside a social world that refuses to accept it. It's one of Fassbinder's masterpieces and its placement at the end of an American interracial romance series is a smart curatorial choice: here is what the same subject looks like when a European filmmaker with Sirk's movies explicitly in his head is working on it.
Saturday, September 6th runs the Western Comedies block with Blazing Saddles (1974) at 8pm and The Paleface (1948) at 10pm. Blazing Saddles doesn't need me to sell it but I'll note that it is one of those films that holds up not in spite of its formal lawlessness but because of it - a film that ends by breaking through the wall of the film itself, literally, and it does so having already earned the gesture through 90 minutes of earned absurdity. Noir Alley gives us He Ran All the Way (1951), John Garfield's last film, a gangster on the run holing up in a working-class family's apartment. It's one of the more suffocating noirs in the slot's catalog, and Garfield - who died of a heart attack at 39, almost certainly brought on by the stress of the HUAC blacklist process - brings a trapped quality to the performance that has nothing to do with acting.
Sunday, September 7th spotlights Elsa Lanchester, and Bride of Frankenstein (1935) at 8pm is the reason she deserves a spotlight. Four minutes of screen time, an electrical crown, that hiss, and one of the most immediately iconic performances in film history. James Whale directing her, her then-husband Charles Laughton playing Frankenstein's creator in the same film, and Lanchester somehow making her brief appearance feel like both the climax and the thesis of the whole picture. The TCM Imports close the night with two essential films from Italian director Ermanno Olmi: I Fidanzati (1963) at 2:15am and Il Posto (1960) at 4am - the latter being one of the most quietly devastating films about young people entering the workforce ever made, a film that observes without sentimentality and breaks your heart through pure specificity.
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Monday, September 8th opens the Peter Sellers Star of the Month. The Ladykillers (1955) at 8pm is the Ealing entry, Sellers in the ensemble, and it's a film that has aged beautifully - a gang of criminals undone by a sweet old lady who doesn't quite understand what's happening around her. The real Sellers programming this month gets more interesting as it goes, but this is a warm opening.
Tuesday, September 9th is the Paddy Chayefsky night and it's one of the best-conceived evenings in the whole month. The documentary Paddy Chayefsky: Collector of Words (2024) at 8pm, then Marty (1955) at 9:45, Middle of the Night (1959) at 11:30, The Hospital (1971) at 1:45am, Network (1976) at 3:45am.
Chayefsky is the most important American screenwriter most people can't name. He won three Academy Awards for Adapted or Original Screenplay - the only person to do so with solo credits - and the range across these four films demonstrates why: Marty is tender and specific and rooted in a particular working-class Bronx reality that Hollywood almost never bothered to observe; The Hospital is a black comedy about institutional collapse that feels in 2025 like someone read the tea leaves; and Network is the most prescient American film of the last 50 years, a film that predicted the entire architecture of contemporary media and politics with a precision that only looks like satire from a safe distance. Peter Finch's Howard Beale is the patron saint of every unhinged pundit who has appeared on television in the decades since the film was released. The documentary first gives you the context to understand what connects these films, and then the films deliver the argument. This is TCM doing something genuinely educational.
Wednesday, September 10th runs the Edith Head Spotlight Part 2: Oscar Domination. The Heiress (1949) at 8pm and All About Eve (1950) at 10pm - two films in which Olivia de Havilland and Bette Davis respectively are costumed to do specific psychological work, the costumes as characterization. In The Heiress, Head dressed de Havilland's Catherine in increasingly elaborate clothes as the film progresses, literally mapping her growing inheritance onto her body; by the end she's magnificent and unreachable and the visual transformation tracks the emotional one exactly. All About Eve gives Head a different challenge - dressing Margo Channing as a star who knows she's aging out of the roles her costumes have always performed for her. The Edith Head Spotlight is most valuable here, where you can see the conceptual work underneath the glamour.
Thursday, September 11th opens the William Wyler tribute, Part 1: Pre-War. Dodsworth (1936) at 8pm is the anchor, and I want to make a case for it as one of the underrated great films of the 1930s. Walter Huston as an American industrialist who retires and goes to Europe with his socially ambitious wife, and the film is about the slow recognition that he has mistaken the woman he married for the life he wanted, and that neither of them can make the other what they need. It's an adult film in the truest sense - about people in their middle age confronting what their choices have actually produced - and Wyler's restraint with it is exquisite. The Letter (1940) and Jezebel (1938) follow in the late night, both with Bette Davis, both showing Wyler doing something different - the former cool and claustrophobic, the latter operatic. Wuthering Heights (1939) at 3am with Laurence Olivier and Merle Oberon rounds out the night as the romantic extreme.
Friday, September 12th is the Interracial Romance Part 2 with Bogle. One Potato, Two Potato (1964) at 8pm - an independent film about a custody battle involving an interracial couple, made outside the Hollywood system specifically because the studios wouldn't touch it, and still one of the most uncompromising American films on the subject. Guess Who's Coming to Dinner (1967) at 10pm is the one everyone knows, the Hepburn and Tracy and Poitier film, and the gap between how the two films handle the same material tells you a great deal about what happens when the subject moves from independent to studio production. Ali: Fear Eats the Soul returns for the Fassbinder night owls at 4am.
Saturday, September 13th brings the Bogart and Huston double feature: The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948) at 8pm and Key Largo (1948) at 10:15. I've written about both films before and I'll just add here that they make a genuinely instructive double feature about greed - Treasure is about greed metastasizing in isolated conditions, transforming friendship into paranoia; Key Largo is about what happens when greed walks into a room and demands everyone in it accommodate it. Bogart is the constant across both, and the difference between his characters - one destroyed by what he finds in himself, one refusing to be - is a good conversation to have with yourself while watching. Noir Alley gives us Sudden Fear (1952), Joan Crawford discovering her husband plans to murder her, and playing the revelation with total commitment to the genre's logic.
Sunday, September 14th has the Doris Day double feature: The Thrill of It All (1963) at 8pm and Midnight Lace (1960) at 10pm. Day is one of those performers whose reputation has been shaped by the wrong films - the Ross Hunter films, the Doris Day comedy opposite Rock Hudson - and Midnight Lace is the corrective. A woman being psychologically terrorized and not believed, and Day playing genuine fear in a way that the comedies never let her approach. It's a Hitchcock-adjacent thriller that works considerably better than its reputation. The TCM Imports give you early Makavejev: Man is Not a Bird (1965) and Love Affair, or the Case of the Missing Switchboard Operator (1967) - two Yugoslav films by the director who would later make WR: Mysteries of the Organism and generally scandalize everyone. These are the early, relatively accessible entries, and they're full of formal restlessness that signals exactly where Makavejev was heading.
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Monday, September 15th is the Peter Sellers Kubrick night: Dr. Strangelove (1964) at 8pm, The World of Henry Orient (1964) at 10pm, Lolita (1962) at midnight. I've been putting off saying something about Sellers because I wanted to wait for the right night, and this is it.
The case for Sellers as the greatest film comedian of his generation rests most completely on Dr. Strangelove, where he plays three characters - President Merkin Muffley, Group Captain Mandrake, and Dr. Strangelove - and each of them is so internally complete that you forget they're the same person within minutes of switching between them. What makes this extraordinary rather than merely impressive is that none of the three characters is performing for laughs. Sellers plays all three with absolute conviction, as if the comedy is a property of the situation rather than the performance, and the result is something Kubrick couldn't have achieved with anyone else - a film in which the end of the world is genuinely funny without ever being played as funny. The comedian disappears inside the characters and the characters believe they're in a drama.
Lolita at midnight gives you Sellers as Clare Quilty, arriving and departing the film like a recurring hallucination, and it's the performance that most purely demonstrates his ability to unsettle without apparent effort. He's in maybe 20 minutes of a two-hour film and he's all you think about afterward.
Tuesday, September 16th is the Lauren Bacall birthday tribute and Hispanic Heritage Part 1 with Fernando Lamas. The Lamas films - The Law and the Lady (1951), Dangerous When Wet (1953), Rich, Young and Pretty (1951) - are mostly star vehicles, but the Hispanic Heritage framing reminds you that the studios had one template for Latin male stars in this era and Lamas was fitted into it without much negotiation. Dangerous When Wet at 10pm is the Esther Williams film with the underwater cartoon sequence, and it's a genuine pleasure as spectacle.
Wednesday, September 17th is Edith Head Oscar Domination Part 2. A Place in the Sun (1951) at 8pm and Roman Holiday (1953) at 11pm are the anchors. Monty Clift and Elizabeth Taylor in A Place in the Sun - Head dressing Taylor in white, in a film about desire and social climbing and murder, and the white as both aspiration and condemnation. Roman Holiday is the one most associated with Audrey Hepburn and with the image that launched her career, and what Head understood intuitively was that Hepburn's particular quality required clothes that looked like they were barely there - costumes that didn't announce themselves, that let the person wearing them remain present. The Man Who Would Be King (1975) runs at 3:15am for the Huston-completists and it's worth noting here as a film in which Head's work is in a completely different register than the glamour pictures - adventure costumes, period recreation, the practical business of making Connery and Caine look like Victorian soldiers and somehow also like men completely out of their depth.
Thursday, September 18th is Wyler Part 2: Post-War. The Best Years of Our Lives (1946) at 9pm, Friendly Persuasion (1956) at midnight, Ben-Hur (1959) at 2:30am. I wrote about The Best Years of Our Lives at length in the May preview and I won't repeat myself, except to say: the thematic logic of the Wyler tribute is most visible tonight. Pre-war Wyler was interested in personal moral failure and romantic self-deception - Dodsworth, Jezebel, Wuthering Heights. Post-war Wyler is interested in collective moral experience, in what nations ask of individuals and what individuals can ask back. The Best Years and Friendly Persuasion are both about the violence of war's demand and the survival that follows it. Ben-Hur at 2:30am is Wyler working at a scale that shouldn't accommodate the personal filmmaking that made his early career, and using the spectacle to make personal points about slavery and liberation and faith. The chariot race is still the most purely cinematic piece of action filmmaking in his career, which for a director of his literary tendencies is a particular kind of accomplishment.
Friday, September 19th is the Neil Simon night: The Odd Couple (1968), Biloxi Blues (1988), Brighton Beach Memoirs (1986), The Goodbye Girl (1977), The Sunshine Boys (1975). Simon is a writer who gets underrated because he's so good at being accessible, which is the kind of thing that makes critics nervous. The Odd Couple is perfect in ways that look easy. The Sunshine Boys at 4am - Walter Matthau and George Burns as a former comedy duo who hate each other - is the one I'd argue hardest for, because it's about aging and failure and the specifically theatrical form of self-esteem that requires an audience to exist, and Burns in particular is doing something that only someone who had been in the business as long as he had could do.
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Saturday, September 20th gives us Lucy and Desi in prime time: Too Many Girls (1940) and The Long, Long Trailer (1954). The latter is Vincente Minnelli directing them at the height of their fame and their marriage, and the comedy of a couple trying to tow an enormous trailer across the country functions simultaneously as broad slapstick and as a document of two people who are genuinely very funny together and who know it. They were separated a year later. Watch it anyway.
The Noir Alley entry deserves note: The Murderers Are Among Us (1946) is the first German film made after World War II, and its presence in the Noir Alley slot is TCM making a quiet argument about the genre's international reach. Wolfgang Staudte directing a film about a former surgeon haunted by a wartime atrocity he witnessed, in the actual rubble of Berlin, and the documentary reality of the destroyed city underneath the fiction gives it a weight that the classical Hollywood noirs can't quite match.
Sunday, September 21st is Bill Murray's 75th birthday: Meatballs (1979) at 8pm and Quick Change (1990) at 10pm. Quick Change is the one I'd argue for if you haven't seen it - Murray directing himself as a bank robber who can't get out of New York after a perfect heist, and the film is a comedy about incompetence that has the texture of a nightmare. It's the least famous thing Murray ever directed and the fact that he only directed it once says something about how much effort it took. The TCM Imports give you Bergman's Smiles of a Summer Night (1955) at 4am, one of his most purely pleasurable films, a romantic comedy in the Swedish countryside that is warm and wise and something of a corrective to the reputation he has for relentless darkness.
Monday, September 22nd continues Sellers with the Pink Panther entries: The Pink Panther (1963) and A Shot in the Dark (1964). Inspector Clouseau is the character that made Sellers a household name and it's worth noting what's strange about it, which is that Clouseau should not be likable - he's vain, oblivious, and incompetent in ways that cause real damage - and he is completely likable, because Sellers plays the vanity and obliviousness as genuine rather than performed, as the natural expression of a man who simply cannot process information that conflicts with his self-image. The comedy is never at Clouseau's expense in the way that slapstick usually positions itself. It's at the expense of a universe too chaotic to resist him.
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Tuesday, September 23rd is the Gabriel Figueroa cinematography tribute for Hispanic Heritage Part 2. The Fugitive (1947) at 8pm, Under the Volcano (1984) at 10pm, The Night of the Iguana (1964) at midnight, and Buñuel's The Exterminating Angel (1962) at 5am.
Figueroa was the greatest Mexican cinematographer of the classical era, and his collaboration with John Huston and with Luis Buñuel gives this night two very different registers. Huston used Figueroa's deep contrast and dramatic skies to mythologize Mexico's landscape; Buñuel used the same sensibility to undermine and subvert the bourgeois subjects he was filming. Under the Volcano at 10pm is the most underrated entry - John Huston's final masterpiece, Malcolm Lowry's almost-unfilmable novel, Albert Finney as a British consul in Mexico on the Day of the Dead, drinking himself to death with absolute lucidity about what he's doing. Finney's performance is one of the great late-career achievements of his generation, and Figueroa photographing it gives the whole film a weight of time and heat that nothing else in Huston's late career quite has. This night is the kind of thing you come to TCM for.
Wednesday, September 24th closes the Edith Head Spotlight with "Later Career": Sex and the Single Girl (1964), Barefoot in the Park (1967), Hotel (1967). The later Head films show a designer adapting to the 1960s shift in fashion - the rigid glamour of the studio system giving way to something more improvisational and youth-directed - and Barefoot in the Park is the clearest example of Head working against her own instincts and succeeding. Jane Fonda's young wife in a walk-up Manhattan apartment required clothes that looked like they could have been bought off a rack, and a designer known for constructing fantasy had to learn to construct the appearance of its absence.
Thursday, September 25th is the UCLA Film & Television Archive 60th anniversary night, and it's one of the odder and more interesting programming choices in the month. My Darling Clementine (1946) at 8pm, then a sequence of archive materials: the short film Greedy Humpty Dumpty (1936), a fragment of The Devil and Daniel Webster (1941), Paper Moon (1949), a Screen Director's Playhouse television episode, a This is Your Life segment featuring Ida Lupino from 1958. Then Donna Deitch's Desert Hearts (1985) at 1:15am - a lesbian romance set in Reno during the 1950s, filmed with period-accurate production design and an emotional intelligence that makes it considerably more than a curiosity. The UCLA Archive programming reminds you that film history is larger than the theatrical releases on any given schedule, and Desert Hearts at 1:15am is TCM making sure one of the important films in that expanded history doesn't get lost.
Friday, September 26th is the Paul Thomas Anderson guest programmer night, and the lineup tells you exactly who PTA is and what he's been paying attention to. Running on Empty (1988) at 8pm - Sidney Lumet, River Phoenix, a family of former radicals still living underground - followed by Midnight Run (1988) at 10:15, then The French Connection (1971) at 12:30am, The Battle of Algiers (1966) at 2:30am, and The Searchers (1956) at 4:45am.
The list is a portrait of a filmmaker's obsessions: American institutions and the people outside them; the physical grammar of New York City in the 70s; political violence and its moral accounting; the darkness inside American myth. Running on Empty into Midnight Run is a surprising pairing that makes complete sense - two road films, two fathers and sons, one elegiac and one comic but both interested in the same question about what you owe the next generation. The Searchers at 4:45am is PTA saying: this is where I come from, this is the film that lives under everything. He said in interviews that he thinks about The Searchers constantly. This is as close as a guest programmer night gets to a director's artistic autobiography.
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Saturday, September 27th brings the Carol Reed double feature: The Third Man (1949) at 8pm and Our Man in Havana (1960) at 10pm. The Third Man is Orson Welles on a Ferris wheel making the case for nihilism, and one of the most perfectly composed films in British cinema - Carol Reed and Robert Krasker's tilted frames and deep shadows making postwar Vienna feel like a city that has stopped trusting the vertical. The cuckoo clock speech. The final shot in the alley. All of it. Our Man in Havana is the underrated companion piece - Greene again, Reed again, Alec Guinness as a vacuum cleaner salesman who becomes a spy without quite meaning to, a film that is gentle where The Third Man is ruthless. Noir Alley gives us Berlin Express (1948), another postwar European spy picture, and the thematic coherence of a Saturday built around occupation and espionage is quietly excellent.
Sunday, September 28th runs Family Musicals in prime time - Annie (1982), which I have affectionate feelings about and exactly no illusions about - and then the TCM Imports give us Fassbinder's World on a Wire (1973) at 2:15am, a three-and-a-half-hour television film about simulated reality that feels, in 2025, like it was made last year. It's Fassbinder doing science fiction inside a thriller inside a corporate paranoia film, and the whole thing was shot for German television and has the slightly claustrophobic intensity of something that knows it's operating under budget constraints and decides to turn those constraints into an aesthetic. Genuinely essential viewing if you've never encountered it.
Monday, September 29th is the final Sellers Monday: The Party (1968) at 8pm, The Return of the Pink Panther (1975) at 9:45, Being There (1979) at 11:45pm. Being There is the one I want to end the month's Sellers programming on, because it is both the most purely Sellers and the most finally mysterious thing he made. A gardener with no inner life who is mistaken for a sage, and a performance of radical blankness - Sellers playing a man who is literally nothing inside, whose placidity is mistaken for depth, and the country projects its own desires onto him. It is either the cruelest performance he ever gave or the most compassionate, and I've never been able to decide which. He was dying when he made it. I don't know how much that should inform how you watch it, but I find that I can't watch it without knowing it.
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Tuesday, September 30th is the last day of September and it closes the month on a note that feels like a door closing on a whole era of American cinema.
Remembering James Dean - East of Eden (1955) at 8:45pm, Rebel Without a Cause (1955) at 11pm, Giant (1956) at 1am, with George Stevens: A Filmmaker's Journey (1984) at 4:30am. The daytime theme is Nicholas Ray Day, which gives the full context for what Ray meant to Dean and to the moment they shared.
Rebel Without a Cause is the film, and I want to say something about it that doesn't get said often enough: it is not primarily a film about teenagers or juvenile delinquency. It is a film about men who cannot perform the emotional labor that their families and their culture require of them, and Dean's Jim Stark is the son of a father who cannot protect him from anything. The film asks what happens to boys when masculinity fails them before they even begin, and it remains as unanswered a question as American culture has produced. Ray's camera treatment of Dean - the closeness, the sympathy, the refusal to aestheticize his pain even while making it beautiful to watch - is as intimate as direction gets. They understood each other in ways that transcended the professional relationship.
Giant at 1am is Dean's last completed film and it's the one where you can see what would have become of him as an actor - the older Jett Rink, aged up through makeup, sitting alone at his own banquet table unable to speak, is one of the saddest images in 1950s Hollywood cinema. Dean died in a car accident nine days before the film's release. He was 24.
September ends with that. George Stevens' documentary at 4:30am for whoever is still watching. Dawn coming up.
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September 2025: The Superlatives
The One You Can't Miss: Network (September 9, 3:45am). The Chayefsky night builds to it and it earns the buildup. Still the most accurate map of where we ended up.
The Night of the Month: September 9 - the Paddy Chayefsky retrospective. Marty to Network in a single evening. An argument about American life made across twenty years.
The Discovery of the Month: The World, the Flesh and the Devil (September 5, 12:30am). Belafonte alone in Manhattan. A film that couldn't quite say what it wanted to say and remains fascinating for the gap.
The Guest Programmer Pick: Paul Thomas Anderson's September 26. Running on Empty into Midnight Run into The French Connection into The Battle of Algiers into The Searchers. A filmmaker's entire aesthetic lineage laid bare.
The Hidden Treasure: Under the Volcano (September 23, 10pm). Huston's last masterpiece, Finney's performance, Figueroa's photography. One of the least discussed great films of the 1980s.
The Spotlight Worth Following: The Edith Head Wednesdays, all four. Start on the 3rd and go through the 24th. By the end you will see costume design differently than you did at the beginning.
The Double Feature That Works Best: Carol Reed on September 27 - The Third Man into Our Man in Havana. The same novelist, the same director, ten years apart and in completely different registers. The contrast is the point.
The Night to End the Month On: September 30. James Dean, Nicholas Ray Day. Rebel Without a Cause at 11pm, Giant at 1am. Don't miss the ending.
The Performance Worth Your Time: Albert Finney in Under the Volcano (September 23, 10pm). A man drinking himself to death with full lucidity about what he's doing. It's extraordinary and almost nobody talks about it.
The TCM Imports Pick of the Month: Il Posto (September 7, 4am). Ermanno Olmi, 1960, a young man's first day at a clerical job. One of the most quietly devastating things in the Imports catalog.
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September has more architecture than it first shows. The Edith Head Spotlight teaches you to see costume as argument. The Bogle series treats a subject with the seriousness it deserves. The Wyler tribute across two Thursdays makes a case for a filmmaker whose range the single-night tribute would flatten. And Anderson's guest programmer Friday is the month's single most personal moment - a filmmaker telling you who he is through five films he didn't make. The month ends with James Dean at 24, and everything that followed. TCM knows how to close a door.
